


deciduous|evergreen

by boo98 (butter)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Light Angst, Like if Buzzfeed Unsolved met an HGTV show, M/M, Magical Realism, Modern witch Minghao and human disaster Mingyu, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-16 21:05:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 45,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14818850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butter/pseuds/boo98
Summary: It takes moving away to make Mingyu feel settled.It takes moving back to make Minghao really change.The house stands, through it all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this isn't really a chaptered fic, I'm posting it in two parts partly to help pacing and partly to meet the deadline. think of it as a two-part oneshot!
> 
> edit: try three-part... sorry guys
> 
> suggested listening for this part:
> 
> Lost in My Mind | The Head and the Heart  
> Wide Open Spaces | Dixie Chicks  
> Halley Came to Jackson | Mary Chapin Carpenter  
> Long Monday | Twin Bandit  
> I Decided | Dustbowl Revival

The problem with weather is this:

When things can go from warm and sinking-stone comfortable, to the shock of ice and cold, in just a matter of days, things crack.

Most people, these days, tend to turn their noses up at cracked and broken things.

A very small few look at them and want to fix them.

And most of those few left, long ago.

 

“I just think that you need to sit and think about all this, darling.”

“I’ve done that, mom,” Mingyu says, distracted and almost dropping the phone from where he has it wedged between his ear and shoulder as he wrestles one of his suitcases down from the trunk of the taxi that he caught at the bus station. “Don’t worry too much. It’s not like I’m in the middle of nowhere.”

His mom makes a tsk noise through the phone, familiar and always just as stomach-wrenchingly guilt-inducing as the last time. “It sure seems that way to me. You’re sure that you don’t just want me to come down there? I can cook for you, and we can talk.”

“We’re talking now. Besides,” Mingyu continues, switching the phone to his right ear so he can use his left hand to heave his laptop bag over his shoulder. “I think this is what I need. You’ve always asked me about why I don’t write much anymore. I think this’ll help.”

He listens to her make worried noises and discuss the merits of staying in his nice city apartment as he shuffles everything around so that his things are all on the gravel drive leading off the main road, and finally gathers up the confidence to interrupt her. “I have to call you back in a bit, mom, okay? Gotta bring my stuff to the house.” He returns the cab driver’s amused smile with his own sheepish one, raising one shoulder in a kind of ‘what can you do?’ gesture.

“Kim Mingyu, you call me as soon as you get into that falling-down death trap. I still have no idea what you think you’re doing with that place – from what the realtor told me, it needs to just be bulldozed down and rebuilt from scratch.”

“When did you talk to the realtor?” Mingyu shakes his head, continuing on. “Never mind – that really shouldn’t surprise me. Mom,” he wheedles finally, taking the handle of one suitcase in his hand and tipping his head subconsciously to the side, even though she can’t actually see him. “I’ll be fine, I promise. I just – I need a new project. Something different than what I’ve been doing.”

He lowers his eyes as the cab pulls away slowly, and kicks some of the loose gravel with the toe of his shoe. The rocks bounce away, until they stop and settle in the stretch of grass to the side of the driveway, more dirt than green. “Besides, it’ll be good for me to be away from the city for a little bit, all things considered.”

He listens to his mom as she seems to hold her breath for a brief moment before letting it all out in a billowy sigh. It would be dramatic if it was anyone else – as it is, it just sounds like proud defeat and a little too sad for his tastes. “Of course. You’re probably right – but, sweetie, what I said before stands, okay? You just say the word and I’m down there on the next train.”

“The trains don’t really get this far out, mom.” Mingyu smiles down at the ground. “You’ll have to catch a bus. And then a taxi.”

His mom squawks, but it’s so clearly half-amused that he can’t actually feel guilty about it. “And you said you weren’t in the middle of nowhere. We’ll see, I’ll have to visit you eventually, when you have your big, beautiful house all done.”

“If I don’t get knocked out by a falling support beam by then,” he jokes, and keeps going before she can remember to worry about him. “I’ll call you before the end of the night, I promise. I love you.”

“I love you too, you stupid boy.” She sighs again, softer and shorter this time. “Before I forget, if that Lee man calls me – “

“Don’t tell him where I am,” Mingyu says before she can even finish, and suddenly it’s everything all over again – his heart pounding in his temples, grip tight on the suitcase handle even though he can’t remember when he moved. “Mom, I – they don’t have anything over me anymore. Don’t let them intimidate you.”

“Well obviously I won’t,” his mom says, and he’s reminded of just how tough she’s always been. “Do you know that last time he tried to write me a check? A check! As if that would mean anything to me, the idiot.”

“That’s strong language, mom,” Mingyu huffs, almost a laugh if his gut wasn’t still unwinding from the knots that it had gone into. “Okay, sorry, um. I’ll call you tonight.”

“Of course you will.” His mom’s voice is thick with a smile, and it’s so, so nice to hear, even for as much as Mingyu likes to think himself an independent adult. “Take care.”

“You too.”

Mingyu checks his battery as he hangs up the call – 22%. Doing great.

He slips the phone into the back pocket of his jeans and gets a good grip on his two suitcases before starting to wheel them up the gravel drive.

There’s an old mailbox on the side of the entranceway where the gravel meets the mostly-smooth pavement of the main road. It’s bent over to the side, with the mailbox actually fallen off onto the ground and the wooden post leaning diagonally.

Mingyu gives it a look as he goes. As far as things go, it seems like a pretty good indication of the state that the rest of the house will be in.

The drive leads in a slight curve into the woods, bending just enough to the left that he can’t see the house from the main road. It only comes into sight as he walks, taking just under five minutes of slow-going, weighed down by his stuff, before he sees it fully.

A bird in the trees around him lets out a cooing noise, and something makes a few twigs crack in the distance.

A shiver goes up Mingyu’s spine, underneath the cotton of his t-shirt – the summer air is humid and hot, but a chill still pricks goosebumps up on his skin for just a bare second before they’re gone.

He shifts his grip on the suitcases and only pauses for a second before continuing up the driveway, sneakers crunching through gravel as he goes.

The house is huge, bigger than he thought. He had known that he was only kind of understanding the square kilometers as the real estate agent was talking to him about the house, but it’s definitely hammered in now just how much he’d been underestimating it.

It’s two floors above ground with a roof that slants down on the right to leave a third story on just the left side of the building – the attic, he figures, or a loft or something. The walls are white-painted paneling that stretches horizontally across the house, with darker panels on the roof and forest green shutters on the windows.

Mingyu stops again, just shy of the steps that lead up to the front door, suitcases on either side of him. There’s space on either side of the steps for hedges, or a garden, but all there is are tangled weeds, lush and green from the sun and shade that the forest lends to this spot, and ivy trying its best to creep up the sides of the house.

The foundation is stone. That seems important, somehow.

Finally digging into his pocket for the keys that the real estate agent had express-shipped to his apartment, Mingyu steps up to the front door. It’s wooden, painted that same green as the window shutters.

There’s a faintly faded patch of the cement of the front step where a welcome mat would be. Mingyu stands on it, feeling suddenly like a trespasser for all that he technically owns the house, and carefully fits the keys into first the deadbolt lock, and then the doorknob.

The lock feels weighty when it turns over, and it creaks out a kind of worrying noise when he unlocks the doorknob one. Mingyu makes, somewhere in all of the thoughts that it seems like he has running through his head at that particular time, a note to look into that.

The door sticks at first when he tries to push it open, but it swings easily enough once he bumps it with his shoulder.

When the real estate agent had first talked to him about the house, she’d used a lot of terms like “fixer-upper” and “needs some love and attention”. Later, once he’d paid the down payment and she’d gotten an eyeful of his actual business card, she’d graduated onto talking more frankly about the state the plumbing was in, and the shaky family history of the house.

“I’m not saying it’s haunted,” she told him once over the phone as he sat at the kitchen table in his apartment. “But I _am_ saying that other people may say that. Don’t worry, no one actually died in the house, or even on the property, as far as I can tell. It’s just the type of estate that has a lot of history.”

She liked to use words like ‘estate’, and talk at length about the acreage that the house came with, but it wasn’t until Mingyu actually got to the house that all that seemed to ring kind of true.

“Oh fuck.” He almost falls down the stairs, backwards, when a shadow darts out in front of him, skittering across the entranceway before disappearing into the dark on the other side of the light that the open door casts into the front hall.

“It’s just a mouse,” Mingyu finds himself saying, leaving his bags on the steps and taking just his phone with the flashlight turned on to venture further into the house. “Don’t freak out, Kim Mingyu. You’re an independent 27 year old. You got this.”

The entranceway is wide and open, with a dusty red carpet lying over even dustier dark wooden flooring. His sneakers send puffs of that dust into the air as he walks, and when he turns around to look back he’s actually left footprints.

The first lightswitch he finds on the wall doesn’t work, obviously. He’d called the local power company about turning the electricity on in the house and they’d taken a few moments to laugh at him before saying that sure, they’d turn it on, but good luck to him to get anything to actually work.

Mingyu wasn’t anything close to an electrician - but, then again, what was he?

“I could be an electrician now,” he muses under his breath as he swings the dim beam of his phone flashlight side to side as he went. “That’d be a change.”

The house creaks around him, wood settling and floorboards squeaking as he heads further into the building. The entranceway leads into a sitting room, with furniture covered in old drop-clothes that he figures he shouldn’t touch without gloves, probably, definitely.

He takes a moment to open the curtains at each window he passes by. The shutters on the outside of the house had all been left open when the last tenant had moved out, and so once he pushes the heavy shades to the side the pale morning light shines in easily, if just a little weakly through the dirty glass of the windows.

It’s just after nine, if Mingyu’s phone clock is to be trusted. The summer sun has been up for hours now, and Mingyu’s been up for even longer - he first caught the train in the city at almost four in the morning.

He stands in the middle of the musty sitting room to the house he now owns, hands on his hips and dust motes floating in the air, lit by the sunlight finally let in through the windows for the first time in who knows how long.

“Right,” he mutters, under his breath and for the first time in a long time not feeling completely stupid for talking to himself. “Let’s get moving.”

The first place he finds is the small town library. It takes a short walk up the road to the nearest bus stop, and then a ten minute ride into the center of the small town that sits on the edge of the woods, and Mingyu spends most of the trip looking out the window and not checking emails.

The town is nice, really, he thinks as the bus rolls past small farms and houses that are painted pale eggshell shades of blue and cream and tan.

The bus driver is an older woman who smiles curiously at him as he gets off, and Mingyu finds himself smiling back.

It’s still early summer, so the air outside isn’t so heavy with humidity as it could be. Mingyu’s t-shirt still sticks to the back of his shoulders pretty quickly after he’s walked a few blocks down the sidewalk, but it’s not a bad heat, all things considered.

He’d gotten off the bus a few stops earlier than the quick search on his phone had told him to - he wanted to get a sense of his surroundings.

He ends up signing up for a library card and checking out a small pile of books - manuals on plumbing and electricity and carpentry and landscaping. The heavy weight of them in the backpack he’d brought on the bus with him is comforting, somehow, even for how unfamiliar it is.

Mingyu hangs back to charge his phone with their working electricity, and is a little too relieved to find out that they don’t have Wi-Fi. The notification bubble on his email app has paused in its upward climb since he’d left the bus station with their wireless connection that morning, and he doesn’t really want to know how much higher it’s gotten in the time since.

He heads out after a few hours of slogging through information about circuit breakers and wattage and making sure you don’t set anything on fire. It’s just late enough that his stomach grumbles angrily at him as he makes his way back in the direction of the bus stop, and Mingyu actually catches himself pausing to shoot a betrayed look down at the source of the sound.

He ends up getting a sandwich and the address to the closest grocery store that actually has decent produce from the same teenage girl working the counter at a lunch place. She tucks her hair behind her ear shyly in a way that is familiar, if just a little alien, because that’s where it all stops.

Mingyu smiles and takes the slip of paper with the address written on it, just a street number and name, like it’s assumed that it’s all he needs.

The house is a little easier to approach in the middle of the afternoon, his backpack heavy with books and his arms weighed down with a few groceries and a bag of ice for the small cooler that he’d also picked up at the store. The windows still look almost too big, but the couple that he’d opened up earlier break the pattern just enough to make it look more human, lived-in.

Mingyu ends up dumping the ice and perishables into the cooler and leaving it in the shade of one of the trees near the house - it feels cooler outside, with the moving air and the breeze, than it actually does in the house.

When he unlocks the door again the air is just as stale, heavy and humid, as it was when he left that morning. It feels just a little better from the way that the sun has been allowed to actually stream through the windows that he opened, but his skin still breaks out into a sweat the second he steps over the threshold.

He retraces his steps, goes back into the sitting room to try to push the windows up. Some of them stick, rusted over or otherwise immobile, but he manages to get most of them open.

Mingyu spends the evening like that, mostly. He leaves his backpack ignored next to his suitcases and just pads around the dusty first floor, opening curtains and windows and not touching the furniture, all covered like misshapen ghosts.

He pauses for one moment at the foot of the windy staircase that leads up to the second floor, taps his fingers on the wooden banister, but ultimately leaves it be. For some reason, the house feels like it needs to be taken apart, piece by piece. He doesn’t want to push it.

The sitting room leads into the dining room which leads into the kitchen which leads into the family room, with a bricked-up fireplace and more covered furniture. Mingyu doesn’t really touch much, beyond opening the windows and taking note of obviously-broken things, like a long thin crack that runs down the center of the kitchen table, and what seems like a gas lamp that he finds shattered in the corner of the sitting room next to a sofa.

Soon enough, it’s dusk.

Mingyu makes himself another sandwich from the cold cuts and cheese he’d packed in the cooler and eats it while sitting on the stoop of the house, looking out across the gravel drive and into the woods.

The sun doesn’t set until late, still, and so the sky is this orange-blue that it only really gets when it’s this time of year, when there’s lots of time for the sunset and it’s not some sudden thing that happens close to four in the afternoon.

The trees are a dark silhouette against the horizon and Mingyu tips his head back against the stair railing, holding his wrists loosely so he can hook his arms around his knees.

There’s a sudden burst of motion as a flock of shadowy birds comes flying out of the top of the treeline, taking off to the right of the house.

Around him, the forest settles into a low thrum of motion, mostly-quiet but never completely silent. Crickets sing, and the trees rustle in a careful rhythm.

The house creaks underneath his weight, and if Mingyu was a more superstitious person he may read too much into the gentle way it almost seems to form words, with the shifting of the foundation and the way that the curtains drift against each other in the breeze from the open windows.

The next morning, Mingyu wakes up with a faceful of dust and watches the same mouse from yesterday (or maybe a different one, who knows with these things) dart along the wall until it disappears around a corner into the kitchen.

He heaves himself up off the floor, where he slept in a sleeping bag that he got as kind of an afterthought before he left the city, and just has to sit there for a second to rub his face.

When he finally blinks sleep out of his eyes, Mingyu sits there and takes in the entranceway. It’s actually fairly well-lit, considering, and the particular shade of light coming in the windows hints that it’s still fairly early in the morning.

He turns over and clumsily grabs for his phone from where he’d tossed his backpack and thumbs the home button. Just past seven in the morning. Not too bad.

He has three missed calls - one from his mom, and she left a voicemail, and two from a number that he still knows well, even for how it’s been deleted out of his contacts. They didn’t leave a message.

When he eventually gets up, rolls the sleeping bag up and into the bag it came with, and stretches hard enough to send cracks all down his spine, Mingyu notices the truck parked out in front of the house.

His stomach goes cramped and nervous without any real reason, and Mingyu takes his time changing into a different t-shirt and a pair of jeans out of personal spite.

He spares a second to wonder if he should check the plumbing today before steeling himself and slipping into his sneakers, unlocking and opening the door in the same motion.

For a second he wonders, very genuinely, if a hunter or a hiker or someone parked their car in the drive before heading out deeper into the woods, because there’s no sign of life other than Mingyu, and the birds that are chirping loudly to signal the start of the day.

The truck itself is a dark forest-green, with patches of red rusting off into silver at the bumpers. There’s the outline of a bumper sticker on the back, where it looks like the actual sticker was peeled off, leaving just the sticky rectangular outline in its place.

Mingyu actually almost turns around to go back inside when a head pops up around the back of the truck, someone jumping up to lean out of the driver’s seat. “Hey!” The man - practically a boy, Mingyu thinks in the back of his mind, although who’s he to talk, really - must twist some ridiculous way to wiggle out of the driver’s seat and stand up on the edge of the doorframe, propping his elbows up on the roof of the truck and resting his chin in his hands. “‘Morning.”

Mingyu knew that people tended to be more open and friendly in small towns like this one, but this seems ridiculous. “Hi. Um, morning.” He closes the front door carefully behind him - he’s not sure why, but the idea of someone else coming into the house, even looking into it, right now feels wrong. “Can I help you?”

“That’s what I should be asking.” The kid actually winks at him, grin bright in the shadow of the baseball cap he has on over dark hair. “Y’know, we were sure that no one would _actually_ buy this place, much less that someone wouldn’t immediately bulldoze it down once they saw it. Is this a dare?”

Mingyu’s mouth twists, confused but regrettably amused already. “Is it really that bad of a place?”

“I dunno, you tell me.” The kid waves a hand accusingly in the vague direction of the house. “Did you really sleep there? When I was in middle school we used to try to get people to spend a night in there, but we could never get the doors open.”

“I’m kind of surprised the windows are all in one piece, then.” Mingyu shoves his hands in his pockets to give them something to do and leans back against the door. “I’m Kim Mingyu.” His stomach protests the honesty, but as if he could pull off the whole ‘fake name’ thing, if he really is here to stay.

The kid’s smile goes surprised, and then ticks up even brighter than before. “Lee Chan. Nice to meet the person crazy enough to buy the old Wu house - I gotta say, though, you look more normal than I thought.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Just saying, I put money on you being a weird old lady with a bunch of cat skeletons everywhere.” Chan hops down from the truck, disappearing briefly behind the body, before he’s rounding around the back of it, one hand hooked into the strap of a backpack and the other tugging at the brim of his hat. “I guess the word’s still out on the cat skeletons, though.”

That actually surprises a laugh out of Mingyu, the sound too-sharp in the morning air, but it feels nice, like ice cracking over a lake in the early, early days of spring. “I can’t say much for the house itself, but I brought no extra skeletons with me.”

“Well, good.” Chan drops his hands and rests them on his hips. He’s wearing scuffed sneakers and jeans with holes in the knees and a t-shirt that looks so old it’s almost worn through at the shoulders. It’s almost the exact same thing that Mingyu’s wearing, but where Mingyu feels too-large, too-different in the space, Chan seems to fit into the scene around him as easily as a puzzle piece, or a shell fitting into the fossil it left behind. “Still, you don’t really seem the type to be buying a haunted house, Kim Mingyu.”

“Is it really haunted?”

Chan’s eyes get, if possible, even brighter at that. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the stories!”

Mingyu shifts uncomfortably. “I just - the realtor said it had some things people in the town said about it, but she didn’t think anyone actually _died_ in it.”

“Well, obviously, sure, but - hold on.” In an instant Chan’s bounded up to the stairs, and then he’s standing just two steps below where Mingyu is trying to not have too much of a panic attack against the front door. “This’ll be fun, I’ll be like your ghost tour guide. Here, c’mere,” and he gestures away from the house with a lazy flap of his hand and a twist to his grin. “We gotta start outside if we’re gonna do this right.”

Mingyu casts a glance longingly back at the door as if he can see through it and to where his phone is sitting, innocently and data-free, on his backpack, before following Chan around the back of the house.

He hasn’t actually been back here yet, and so he feels a little distracted just looking at everything, much less listening to Chan babble about ghosts. The white siding of the house gives way to stone foundation at about the height of Mingyu’s hip, and he absentmindedly trails his fingers along the green vines as they head to the back of the house.

It’s more shaded, back here, the trees taller and closer providing more of a canopy of leaves and branches with just the occasional beam of sunlight breaking through. The grass is tall and tangled wildly, but there’s the remnants of a broken stone pathway that Chan seems to know well, for how easily he’s following it.

“We used to come back here when we were kids,” Chan says, tossing the words over his shoulder like breadcrumbs for Mingyu to follow. “Tell ghost stories, build fires, all that stuff. Most of us still live in town, but it’s different now, y’know?”

Mingyu doesn’t really, but he still makes a faint affirming noise, just to prompt Chan to continue. And he does.

“Anyways. Someone actually lived here, you know, pretty recently.” Chan stops along where the treeline hits the backyard of the house, and kicks at some stones that seem to mark where a fire pit used to be. “They moved out like fifteen years ago, though. No one knows if they just left or what, but I dunno, dude.” He casts a glance back at the shadow of the house, and then turns it to Mingyu. “You’ve seen the place. Someone’s died in there, I’d put money on it.”

“I’m starting to worry about your betting problem,” Mingyu says, mostly to break the strange air of tension that’s hanging around them now, in the partial-shadow under the trees. “Did you ever meet the person who used to live here?”

Chan’s jaw works like he wants to say something, and then he deflates a little and shoves his hands in his jean pockets, mirroring Mingyu. “Nah. Old lady Wu didn’t really leave the house, especially towards the end, there. Plus, I was only seven or eight when she still lived there - I wasn’t exactly hanging out with spooky old ladies as a hobby, y’know?”

“Old lady Wu.” Mingyu glances back at the house, too, and grits his teeth through the chill that runs down his spine. It’s still early in the morning, and in the shade like this it’s cool. “She lived here for a while?”

“Everyone says that the house was always in her family.” Chan bends down to sift through some of the dirt and ash in the middle of the fire pit, stooping down so he can get close enough to see. “People say that her family line’s been here since the town was founded, and that the house was always here for as long as they were. It just got passed down the generations, until fifteen years ago, I guess.”

He uncovers what looks like a tarnished coin, and then a half-burnt scrap of fabric that Chan shakes as if that’ll clean all the ash off of it.

Mingyu watches as Chan seems to think, for a second, before wrapping the coin up in the bit of cloth and straightening up to shove it in his back pocket. “There’s no one left in the family to take over the house, then?”

Chan’s face does something weird, and he laughs. “No one who wants to, at least. It sounds like they were a big family, I’m sure there’s some cousins or something out there who could claim some kind of right over it if they wanted to. Doesn’t sound like old lady Wu actually willed it to anyone when she passed away.”

“Huh.” Mingyu works that thought over in his head. “That’s weird.”

“Is it?”

“Maybe, I dunno. Just,” Mingyu breaks off to look at the house again. “If it was in the family for that long, it feels strange for her to just let it go after her. Especially if there were people that could have taken care of it.”

He turns back to Chan, and his eyes are sharp on his face, regarding him. For a half-second Mingyu panics, starts thinking about excuses he can make and half-reminders that he really should invest in a pair of sunglasses or something, but then Chan’s expression relaxes and he claps a hand on Mingyu’s shoulder.

“C’mon,” he says, “I need to show you the actual cool stuff.”

They push their way through more brush until they reach the far corner of the yard, deep enough into the tree line that Mingyu doesn’t even see the small structure until they’re practically on top of it.

“Woah.” It’s not a very smart comment, but Mingyu figures he can be forgiven for it.

The small, wooden shack is half-collapsed onto itself. It looks about the size of a garden shed, built of old greying wood with a rickety door and a few windows. These actually do have the glass smashed in on them, although it doesn’t immediately scream that someone did it on purpose.

The back of the shed is completely fallen-through where a tree limb lies on top of it. The tree also looks old, dead and dry, so it can’t have fallen recently.

Chan whistles lowly, and spreads his hands out towards the shed like an announcer in a game show. “There you go.”

Mingyu, bizarrely, feels like he can’t get too close to it. He hovers just to the edge of the front of the shed, where some potted plants have withered and died from inattention. “This is part of the house?”

“Yup.” Chan crosses his arms, popping one hip out to the side as he eyes the shed as well. “The old lady was a big fan of gardening, people say. There’s some real creepy shit in there, though, apparently. If you’re big enough to actually try going in.”

Mingyu eyes the tree that fell on the back half of the shed with trepidation. “Seems safe.”

Chan snorts, and follows as Mingyu presses just a little closer so he can prop one hand gingerly on the windowsill and peer in, avoiding the scraps of broken glass that litter the ground and sill. “You’re telling me. I never did, but this one time one of the girls actually went in and stayed in there for a whole _hour._ ”

His tone has all the awe of a preteen telling stories around a fire, and for a second Mingyu is bitterly jealous of that experience. “What’d she do for an hour?”

“Dunno, just looked around.” Chan actually sticks his head through the window, shouldering Mingyu out of the way a little. “She brought back some candles, and she said that there was a bunch of other weird stuff in there.” He huffs, and withdraws his torso from the window. “Looks kind of emptied out now, though.”

Mingyu lets Chan take a step back before he also takes a closer look at the inside of the shed. There are low shelves on each of the walls, at least two stacked on top of each other, with a counter that runs underneath the windows on each side.

Not that there’s much on the shelves. Most of everything seems to have been knocked onto the ground, broken pottery and dirt and what looks like a few moldy books, falling apart from the cycle of wet snow and humid summers that they’ve no doubt seen in the past years.

The back of the shed is completely caved in, obviously. The tree actually seems to have landed directly on top of a table, which is smashed in have underneath its weight.

Mingyu frowns, taking in now what Chan meant when he said it looked emptied out. Even with the half-dozen spots of broken pots, and the scattering of paper and melted wax on the ground, there doesn’t seem to be even close to enough things in the shed to have once filled up the shelves.

He has a quick flash of a thought of someone smashing the windows and gathering up everything of value in their arms, and he’s taken by surprise by the even quicker spike of anger that rockets through his stomach at the idea.

He shakes his head to loosen the image and ducks back out of the window. “Um, that is weird,” he says, and tries the door handle. It jiggles a little but stays stuck still, locked, the only barrier left to the shed.

Something feels weird about trying to break it, and Mingyu leaves it alone.

Chan’s giving him another too-sharp, but approving, look when he turns back around, and he straightens the bill of his hat again. “A little creepy, right?”

“Yeah.” Mingyu rubs his upper arms, goosebumps prickling up in the coolness of the morning. “I’m still not sure if this is exactly ghost-level material, though.”

Chan laughs loudly at that, hands on his hips. “I like your style, Kim Mingyu.” He grins at him. “Well, if you do happen to stumble onto any spectres or satanic ritual circles in that house you just let me know, okay?”

Mingyu laughs too, and before he knows it he’s keying his phone number in Chan’s cell phone.

“Horrible breakdancing accident,” Chan says, tapping on the crack that runs from the top corner of his screen and straight diagonally across to the bottom. “It was tragic.”

Mingyu isn’t sure whether he’s joking or not, so he just of giggles helplessly and ignores the anxious feeling that comes with giving his new phone number out. “I don’t have great service out here,” he says, handing Chan his phone back. “So I may not be responding super quickly.”

“That’s cool.” Chan slaps him on the shoulder again, strangely familiar for a younger kid that he’s known all of twenty minutes, and bounds around to the driver’s side of his car. “I’ll see you around anyways, I’m sure. It’s a small place.”

“Right.” Mingyu watches, feeling like he should wave, as Chan’s truck rumbles over the gravel pathway, backing up a bit before turning and heading out back to the main road.

Mingyu waits until he can’t hear the noise of the tires or the sound of the engine anymore, and then he lets out a breath and turns back to the house.

It feels quieter, now, but not still.

He spends the morning and the better part of the afternoon pulling the drop cloths off of the furniture on the first floor. He has all the windows and doors pushed open to air things out, but it still gets pretty choked with dust as he works.

Most of the furniture is in fine shape, if a little fancier than he was expecting. The sofa in the sitting room has detailed embroidery along the back and down the arms, and when Mingyu runs his fingers against it curiously it rubs firmly against his fingertips.

There’s a long, glass-topped table in the dining room that looks untouched, except for the dust, while the round wooden table set off to the side in the kitchen is pockmarked and water-stained from frequent use.

Mingyu takes a moment to inspect the refrigerator that stands in the kitchen. It’s empty, long-since unplugged, and when he plugs it back in it actually seems to kick on with a low hum.

“Guess the electricity is on, after all,” Mingyu mutters, and leaves the fridge to putter and grow cold.

He moves on to the family room, stopping briefly to toss the pile of drop cloths out the back door that leads from the kitchen onto a low deck facing the back yard. The deck itself looks fairly treacherous, but it holds the weight of the half-dozen tarps easily so far.

The family room turns out to be furnished with more comfortable sofas and chairs, cracking brown leather that’s still soft when Mingyu touches it. There’s a low coffee table in the middle, which hardened rings of melted wax from missing candles.

The fireplace - that’ll be something else. Mingyu taps hesitantly on the boards that have been nailed to the front of the opening, and it sounds hollow behind them. He tugs a little at one of the boards before giving up, and making a mental note to get some tools from a hardware store or something next time he’s in town.

Which, right. He hadn’t had much trouble not owning a car in the city, but things here were just a little different, especially if he was going to have to be lugging tools and supplies and stuff back and forth from further in town.

Mingyu sits heavily on the thin carpet in front of the fireplace, picking a little at a pilling spot by the brick lip of the fireplace. Well. At least he knew someone who may be able to give him a ride, now.

That night the house seems even louder around Mingyu, if that was possible. He curled up in the entranceway again, in his sleeping bag, and it was as if every breeze that blew by sent the foundations of the house into rattling, shifting motion.

He flips around to lie on his side, eyes squeezed tight and face almost hidden underneath the flap of the sleeping bag.

The windows in the sitting room are still mostly open, and the night wind is cool as it ruffles the hair on his forehead.

The chill rests on his forehead before curving down to the back of his neck, and he shudders, curling into a tighter ball, as goosebumps spread out from that point at the top of his spine.

His mind is stuck, bizarrely, on the idea of wrenching the boards off from the front of the fireplace, and lighting a flickering flame in the stomach of it.

He lingers on that image, and on that of Chan picking the coin and the scrap of fabric out of the old fire pit in the backyard, and eventually he falls asleep.

 

His cell phone is at around 40% battery life the next morning when he checks it again, despite only using it once to call his mom since charging it in the library two days ago.

Mingyu fiddles with it in his hands before pulling up the courage to open his recent texts and send out a reply from the most recent one.

He tosses the phone to the side after he sends it and just listens for the ding of a new text as he inspects the bathroom that’s off to the side of the entranceway.

It’s not in great shape. The water runs when he turns on the sink, and he already knows that the toilet works, but the sink faucet runs a kind of dirty brown until he leaves it on for long enough.

He takes a moment to wash his face and do a sort of alright job washing his hair in the sink, once the water runs clear. The mirror above the sink isn’t broken at all, just a little dusty, and Mingyu inspects himself in it curiously as he flips his hair back up off his forehead and shakes it out like a wet dog.

He has dark circles under his eyes but that’s hardly new, and when he tilts his head to the side he’s actually breaking out just a bit at the corner of his jaw.

He grins. It’s been awhile since he’s seen that.

It feels thrillingly new, and Mingyu snorts to himself as he shakes his hair out once more before moving to his suitcases to find a clean t-shirt. Things sure have changed a lot, in just a few days.

Chan texts him back in a quick burst of short, excited messages, full of exclamation points. Mingyu doesn’t know why, but he’s not surprised.

“What day is it, Sunday?” Chan’s voice is too-loud in Mingyu’s ear when he eventually gives up on responding to all of the texts and just calls him, instead. “Yeah, I can totally give you a ride. I don’t have  to work until this evening. What do you need to do?”

Mingyu hums and leans against the doorframe splitting between the kitchen and the dining room, looking at the long counter space and well-worn kitchen table, tile a little faded with dust gathering thickly in the spaces between each. “Cleaning supplies, groceries, some tools and stuff. Just to get started on everything.”

Chan whistles, and Mingyu can hear the sound of an engine turning over in the background. “You’re really making this a whole project, huh? Yeah, that’s easy, though. We’ll stop and get a bunch of that stuff from this one hardware store, then we can get food and everything. You have a fridge?”

“I think so.” Mingyu pulls open the door to the old one in the kitchen and peers at it. It’s cold enough, but he’ll have to buy a thermometer or something to check and make sure it’s good enough for raw meat, and dairy, and things like that. “Do you know anything about plumbing?”

Chan snorts. “You are talking to the wrong guy. I work for the park service for the county, the closest we get to plumbing is, like, water fountains and port-a-potties.” He must roll down the windows in the truck, because there’s suddenly the rush of wind blowing static through the call. “I think I know someone who could help you, though. We can find her when we get in town.”

“Cool.” Mingyu closes the fridge and holds his hand on the handle for a moment, brain stuttering to catch up. “Thanks, um, also. I appreciate it.”

“No problem, dude.” Chan manages to sound warm and smiling even through the phone. “I’ll be there in, like, ten.”

Twelve minutes later, Chan’s truck rolls down the drive and Mingyu gives himself about thirty seconds to seriously reconsider everything before shaking himself out and pulling the front door open.

He locks it, which seems silly, considering the windows are all wide open, but it’s the gesture that counts, he figures.

“Alright,” Chan says, greeting him with a bright grin and a different baseball cap pulled over his hair. “You survived another night, huh? See anything spooky?”

“Just a few mice,” Mingyu says dryly, enjoying the way that Chan slaps the steering wheel when he laughs. Everything’s so open, with him, and it might just be a Chan thing but it also might be a thing for the whole town.

Mingyu hopes so, at least.

They go to the hardware store that Chan mentioned first. It’s more ‘hardware’ than ‘store’, with disorganized shelves and piles of stuff in the back of the store, where an old man picks through the piles with a sharp, discerning eye.

Chan hangs to the front of the store and chats loudly with the girl at the counter, tone happy and familiar as Mingyu makes his way through the store. He picks up a basic toolbox and some industrial gloves, floor cleaner and just plain bleach, a simple mop and a bucket and couple mouse traps. He refuses to feel bad about those, he thinks, dropping them in the cart.

He grabs about everything he’ll think he’s going to need immediately and heads back to the check-out, where Chan and the girl are still talking rapidly.

“There he is!” Chan smacks a palm against the counter before shooting a finger gun in Mingyu’s direction. “Mr. Fearless Stranger, who moved into the old Wu house. Doesn’t he look like he should be in a movie?”

“I’ll say.” The girl props her hip against the counter and crosses her arms, giving him a once-over as Mingyu tries to not look too much like he wants to crawl completely out of his skin. “Mingyu, Chan tells me. Welcome to town, I guess.”

“Thanks.” Mingyu says faintly, flexing his grip on the handle of the cart. “Good to be here.”

The girl snorts and starts ringing up some of his things. Her hands move quick and sure, and her hair is pulled up in a high ponytail with a red elastic. “We’ll see if you’re still saying that after a week or so. That house needs a lot of love, you’ve got a way to go with it.”

“Don’t scare him, Yebin,” Chan whines, fiddling with a pen that he found near the register. “He’s gonna crack the case of that house, you just wait.”

“There’s no case to crack,” Yebin shoots back, unhooking the manual scanner so she can ring up a couple of the larger things that Mingyu left in the cart. “It’s just an old house that no one cared about. I don’t think old lady Wu even really cared about it, towards the end there. Everyone says,” she continues, shooting a look up at Mingyu, “that she only really lived in one room, in the last few years. In the basement.”

Mingyu swallows, glancing warily at Chan, who’s still looking down at the pen. “I haven’t been down there, yet.”

“Good luck when you do.” Yebin flips her ponytail a little and punches some things into the cash register. “Who knows what’s still there, after all these years.”

“Right.” Mingyu waits for her to finish up and hands over his credit card when she does.

Yebin inspects it before raising an eyebrow at him and swiping it through the machine, then handing it back to him. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Kim Mingyu. Chan tells me I have to come check out your pipes sometime.”

Chan snorts out a ridiculous laugh and Mingyu feels his cheeks go bright red as he gets, if possible, even more uncomfortable. “Yebin’s the one with plumbing experience,” Chan says finally, wiping at his eyes. “Classic small town vocational training, you know.”

Yebin makes a face but shrugs. “Makes money. And it’s always helpful to know how to fix your own shit, instead of paying someone to do it.”

“Sure.” They finish up, and load everything into the back of Chan’s truck while Yebin taps some things into her phone and decides on a good day to swing by the house and check out the pipes, as it were.

“I’ll pay you, obviously,” Mingyu finds himself assuring her as Chan starts the car.

Yebin raises an eyebrow and shoots a look up at him that is just a little too knowing. “Yeah you will, rich guy. That’s a fancy card you have,” she continues, poking him in the stomach with the pen she’d stolen back from Chan. “What’s your deal, anyways? Guy with too much money needs something to do with his hands?”

Mingyu laughs weakly, shoving his hands in his pockets and wincing back from the pen. “That’s about right, yeah.”

Chan pops his head out of the window of the car and shoots them a wounded look. “You’re not allowed to be better friends with each other than with me, you know. That’s not fair.”

Yebin flips her ponytail and says something sarcastic yet warm back, and Mingyu takes that opportunity to escape and heave himself up into the passenger seat.

Chan pulls out of the hardware store and onto the road again before chancing a look over at Mingyu. “Yebin’s the one who stayed the hour in the garden shed, out back of the house,” he says, as if the thought is at all connected to anything they’d been talking about before.

Mingyu nods, and drums his knuckles against the open car window. “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

They go to the grocery store next, the same one that Mingyu had just been to. Chan leads the way again, chatting about this and that small town gossip, filling the awkward gaps where Mingyu doesn’t really know what to say, how to respond.

It’s stupidly, really nice, Mingyu finds himself realizing, hands weighed down with four plastic bags as Chan loads up the narrow back seat of the truck with the rest of the bags. He feels - different, more exposed, out here, but it’s not bad. It’s like a clean break.

 _It’s what you were looking for, Kim Mingyu_ , his brain says in the back of his mind, voice familiar still and just a touch cooler than he would like. _Are you happy, now?_

He swallows against the sudden urge to - he doesn’t know. Cry? Laugh? Either way, he pushes the sudden rush of feelings down, back below his ribcage, and pulls a smile out from nowhere when Chan turns back around to hop down and close the car door.

“Alright,” he says, dusting his hands off on the thighs of his jeans. “Anything else?”

“Um.” Mingyu mentally ticks off the things that they bought, and what else they might need. The second list seems incomprehensibly huge, but - baby steps, right? “I think that’s good for today. Thanks, seriously.”

“It’s no problem, honest!” Chan looks completely sincere, and it’s probably stupid how fond Mingyu is of him already. “I’d just be sitting at home being useless otherwise, y’know? And now there’s still plenty of time to drop you off before I have to go to work.”

“Speaking of,” Chan says, a few minutes later when they’re back in the truck and making their way slowly through the handful of traffic lights that make up the center of the town. “What do you do? What’s got you moving way out here?”

And Mingyu really should have prepared better for that question. He looks out the window instead of speaking immediately, watching the town slowly turn from stores to houses to the occasional line of fence and farm. “I was in kind of a bad place,” he says finally, carefully, picking his way around the words like he’s trying to hopscotch on river rocks without falling into the water. “I needed a change of pace, something different. I needed to do something where I could actually see the results of my work.”

There’s no sound but the rush of afternoon wind and the noise of the truck, radio turned low, and then Chan finally clears his throat. “Well,” he starts, and Mingyu jumps a little when Chan reaches over to slap him on the knee without him seeing him move. “This is probably as good a place as any to get away from it all, I’ll say.”

They slow, and Chan takes the left turn onto the gravel drive of the house. “Is it?” Mingyu says, mostly as a way to fill the silence.

“Sure,” Chan replies, shrugging a little as they round the curve towards the house. “It’s a nice town. If you can get past the way that nothing really changes, like, ever.” He slants a bemused smile towards Mingyu. “‘Cept you moving in, everything’s been the same for a while. You’ll be some good change for us, too, I’m sure.”

Mingyu huffs a laugh as Chan parks the truck in the same spot he had it parked yesterday morning. They unload everything, although Chan doesn’t seem to want to stray too far into the house.

“It’s just creepy, is all,” he says, keeping his hands firmly in his pockets as he watches Mingyu put groceries in the fridge from the front entrance. “I don’t know how you sleep in here.”

“I manage,” Mingyu replies, shutting the fridge carefully before heading over to haul in the cleaning supplies that they’d just left on the front stoop. “Eventually maybe I’ll even sleep in one of the beds.”

Chan shudders at that, which is hilarious, and he twists his baseball cap a little. “Well, don’t die,” he finally says in parting, and wiggles his fingers at Mingyu. “Can’t let my first new friend in ages get killed by ghosts on his, what, third night here?”

“That’d be tragic,” Mingyu says, stomach going warm at the mention of ‘friend’. “I’ll see you later. Thanks, again.”

“No problem, dude.” Chan ducks out of the doorway, looking relieved to be back in the open air with the sun close to setting and burning orange above the trees. “Just let me know if you need my wheels again,” he tosses over his shoulder, before pounding down the stairs and hopping back in his truck.

“Definitely,” Mingyu shouts over the rumble of the engine, and leans against the doorframe as he watches the truck, rusty and patchy and with smoke belching out of its tailpipe, roll back down the driveway.

He shakes his head after it makes the eventual curve away from the house and heads back inside, although he leaves the door open. It still feels musty inside - he’s not sure how long it’ll take to get that completely out.

“Cleaning would probably help, huh,” he mutters to himself, nudging one of the bags with the bucket and bleach with his foot.

Instead of cleaning, Mingyu shuffles back to the kitchen and opens up the cabinets under the sink, then the ones over the counter. Most of them are empty, but there are some dusty china plates and old plastic cups in a few of them.

He finds pots and pans finally in the cabinet closest to the stove, and he flips the kitchen faucet on to run for a few minutes as he pulls out a large saucepan and few other things.

The grocery store had been limited in a way he was used to from the city, but in different areas. They had way more produce than he’d had in the city, unless he went to one of the more expensive places, but less choices of meat and other bits and pieces.

He ends up getting the cleaner out to sanitize the counter, then the gas range stove, then the sink itself. The water is running clear now, but he still just uses it to wash out the pots and pans, grabbing bottled water from the fridge to actually cook with.

This was one of the things he’d actually liked about his old apartment. It had a big kitchen, bigger than most upper-floor city apartments, and that had been most of the reason he’d leased it in the first place.

It was kind of meditative, Mingyu always thought, to cook. It was kind of the same thing he was looking for with this house, in retrospect. Something you could do with your hands, and tangibly see the results of.

He’s, admittedly, very focused on the fish and vegetables he’s got stewing on the stove, and so it takes him a while to actually look up from it and glance out the window over the kitchen sink, which opens up into the back yard.

The day is sinking into dusk at this point, the light outside more blue than anything else, and it’s even darker out back with the shadows of the trees, but.

There’s someone by the garden shed.

Mingyu’s stomach drops through his feet, and he drops the spoon he was holding in turn. It clatters against the counter and splatters sauce but he ignores it, creeps around the counter so he can peer out the glass of the back door and get a better look.

It’s hard to see from this far away. The shed is a good twenty yards or so away from the house, and the grass between it and the house is tall and unkempt. Still, it’s definitely a person.

A guy, Mingyu realizes, squinting out at the shed. He’s skinny, wearing a baggy sweatshirt and a pair of dark pants. He looks like he’s trying to get a good look inside the shed, one hand laid softly against the trunk of the fallen tree and the other gripping the edge of the windowsill.

He doesn’t seem to care too much about the spikes of broken glass that Mingyu remembers needing to dodge when he looked into that same window earlier that day.

Mingyu doesn’t make any kind of noise, doesn’t shift at all, but in one second the guy is looking into the shed, and in the next he’s whipped around to stare at the house.

At Mingyu.

Mingyu knows, logically, that with the lights on in the kitchen (they sort of worked, only some of them, and they flickered a little worryingly if he had them on for too long) the stranger will be able to see him really well through the window.

Still, it’s eerie how focused his eyes are, right on Mingyu.

After a moment where they stand at a strange standstill, Mingyu’s hand tightening on the doorknob and the stranger not moving an inch, Mingyu finally swallows and opens the back door.

The hinges creak, and the movement startles a small grey bird that was sitting on the railing that wraps around the small deck.

“Hi, um.” Mingyu’s voice probably shouldn’t sound as loud as it does, echoing across the stretch of the yard, half-muffled by the noise of crickets and the hush of the grass blowing in the breeze. “Can I help you with something?”

The stranger shifts, finally, and takes his hands off of the shed, shoves them in the front pocket of his sweatshirt. The last bits of sunlight are warm, dark-golden, and the motes of dust and grass pollen floats in the air between them.

“What are you doing here?”

Mingyu blinks, feeling caught off-guard and strangely prosecuted. “I live here. I just moved in.”

The stranger takes a few steps, and then a few more, and before Mingyu knows it he’s halfway across the yard. Closing the distance makes it easier to make out the details, and he notes absently the sharp cut of his chin, tilted up to look at Mingyu, and the angry slash of his mouth. His hair is dyed light brown, just on the edge of long, and it tickles into his eyes.

“For how long?”

“For - I don’t know, for a while? You don’t usually buy a house just to move out again a few months later.”

The stranger casts a disparaging glance up at him. He moves and actually steps on the deck, and Mingyu has to stamp down the instinct to reach for him, sure that the deck will give under his weight. The thing looks rotted-through, and the tarps from earlier are still sitting in a lumpy pile.

The deck holds, though. The stranger gets to about halfway towards Mingyu before stopping again. “What’s your name?”

Mingyu bristles. “Kim Mingyu. What’s yours?”

He half expects the guy to ignore his question, but all he does is poke the pile of tarps with the toe of his sneaker and sniff. “Xu Minghao. And you’d be surprised, how long most people would last in this house.”

“Don’t tell me you’re here to warn me about ghosts.” Mingyu leans on the door frame. “I’ve already gotten a lot of that, thanks.”

Minghao laughs a little at that and looks back up at him. “Not ghosts. Just, the house. It’s a lot to handle.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve got some experience handling it.” Minghao reaches out to rest a hand on the wooden stair rail that leads up to the back door to the house, where Mingyu stands. He’s closer now, and Mingyu doesn’t remember him moving, exactly. “It tends to have a mind of its own. Have you noticed that yet?”

“I haven’t really been here that long.”

“Well, you’ll see it soon, I’m sure.” Minghao withdraws his hand and stuffs it back in his sweatshirt pocket. “What are you going to do with the garden house?”

“What, the shed? Probably tear it down, I guess, it needs to be rebuilt.”

“Oh.” Minghao glances over his shoulder, back at the half-crushed building. “I suppose so.” He moves his shoulders in a sort-of shrug. “Good luck with that.”

“Thanks.” Mingyu shifts his weight, uncomfortable and not sure why. “Do you need anything else?”

Minghao pins him with a look for a long second before shaking his head, mouth tilting up at one side. “I don’t think so, not right now.”

He turns to go, walking right on the most damaged section of the deck, sneakers light but not careful against the wood, before pausing and looking over his shoulder again. Mingyu watches him warily as he thuds down the steps to the yard and wanders off to the side of the house, disappearing eventually behind the wall.

Mingyu slumps a little against the door before taking a deep breath and going back inside, back to the kitchen.

The stew on the stove is smoking lightly and he ends up opening the door back up the air out the house, even though the fire alarms no doubt need new batteries. The pot is actually blackened at the bottom, even though Mingyu couldn’t have had the stove flame on anything higher than a low simmer.

Setting the pan in the sink to soak and trying to remember if there was a pizza place in town that would deliver, Mingyu casts a wary look at the stove.

Somehow, this wasn’t what he had thought when Minghao said it was the house that he needed to worry about.

 

Things somehow both go smoother and get more complicated, after that.

Mingyu finally clears off all of the furniture in the first floor, pile of drop cloths on the deck reaching about waist height even on him, and takes to cleaning with a pointed focus.

It’s a lot of dusting, at first, and wiping dust, and getting dust in his eyes and sneezing for a solid thirty seconds. He moves all the furniture to the walls to do the best he can mopping the hardwood, and manhandles the carpets into tightly rolled bundles.

He’s almost a little surprised to not uncover any more than some more dust under them, to be honest. Mingyu had been expecting a trap door or a hidden skeleton or something, at this point.

Yebin swings by on Wednesday in the early afternoon with her hair pulled up and a baseball cap low over her forehead. She gives him not much more greeting than a wave of her toolbox before she disappears into the downstairs bathroom, then under the kitchen sink, then around back of the house.

“Have you been upstairs yet?” She asks him during a break, as she sits looking mostly melted in one of the wiped down kitchen chairs, nursing a water bottle Mingyu had passed her when she came flopping back into the kitchen. “Should I be worried about the stairs just giving out on me?”

“Oh, right.” Mingyu actually hasn’t - not out of some misplaced superstition, but mostly just because it’s been easier so far to focus on one thing at a time. “I’ll go with you.”

Yebin gives him a look but finishes her water, and the sandwich that Mingyu slides over to her a few minutes later, and then stands up and cracks her knuckles. “Let’s tackle this beast, huh?”

The stairs work fine, and when they get up them the landing opens into a narrow hallway, with a set of doors right to the left of the landing that lead to the master bedroom when Mingyu shoulders them open.

Everything in here is also covered with more of the same white-grey tarps, which Yebin helps him yank off one by one. They reveal a wooden dresser, a side table, and a low chest at the foot of the bed.

The mattress looks in surprisingly good shape, although Mingyu definitely doesn’t trust that there isn’t a nest of something moved into it.

Yebin breaks off at that point to bang around in the master bath, leaving Mingyu to wander down the rest of the hallway.

One door opens into a small study, with a sturdy desk and a significantly less sturdy chair pushed into it. It’s mostly empty, and opening the drawers only reveal a few loose pieces of blank paper and pencil stubs.

Mingyu straightens a paperweight in the shape of a sailboat absently where it sits on the top of the desk, and opens the small window that shows the view of the back yard.

The only other room at the end of the hall is a second bedroom, which looks mostly bare of anything. There’s an empty bed frame pushed into one corner, but that’s it.

It’s almost a little weird, considering the full furnishing of the rest of the house, and Mingyu spends about ten seconds poking around before fleeing back into the hallway.

It’s just. It feels strange, in there. He’d rather tackle that one when the rest of the house is in a bit better shape.

The last thing is the attic. The door that Mingyu guesses leads up to it is a square hatch in the ceiling in the hallway, painted to match the walls with just a keyhole in it.

He tugs at the frame of it a little but it doesn’t budge.

“Looks like it’s locked, dude.” Yebin appears behind him and Mingyu definitely doesn’t jump. “Did your real estate lady give you a key for that?”

“Nope.” Mingyu and Yebin stand there looking up at it before a few beats before Yebin shrugs.

“It’s a big house. Can’t get it all in one day.”

“That’s for sure,” Mingyu mutters under his breath, turning to follow Yebin back to the master bath to see what’s inevitably wrong in there.

The days start to gain a sort of routine, after the first week. Mingyu gets talked into buying an air mattress because Chan is convinced he’s going to throw his back out, with all the physical work he’s doing lately while still sleeping on the floor.

Chan hangs out more than Mingyu thought he would, also. He mostly worked evenings and a few random morning shifts that Mingyu can’t work out a pattern between, and so more days than not he turns up on Mingyu’s front stoop with food and a different baseball hat on, grinning widely.

“Can’t let the ghosts get you while you’re all alone,” Chan says, helping Mingyu carry the mattress from the master bedroom downstairs and outside to get picked up for the bulk trash day. “City boy like you, you’d swoon.”

“I don’t think I’m really the damsel in distress type,” Mingyu replies, shifting the weight of the mattress as he walks backwards down the drive.

“Nah,” Chan says, winking at him. “Face like that, you’re the leading man, huh? Tall dark and handsome?”

Mingyu swallows a lump in his throat. “Yeah, right.”

Mingyu weeds the front of the house, just a ring about two feet out from the front steps, because he can’t possibly tackle the rest of the monstrosity that is the front yard.

“I’ll bring my mower over next weekend,” Chan says, watching nosily as Mingyu fries fish in a pan. “We can get it looking golf course perfect, just wait.”

Mingyu hums, because he doesn’t trust the stove to not burn everything it’s touching if he takes his eyes off of it for a second. “Sounds good, thanks.” The back of his neck is a little burnt, he thinks, touching two fingers lightly and feeling it sensitive and warm.

That night, a cooler night than usual as summer tips carefully towards early fall, the sunset just a hint earlier and more red-tinted, Mingyu’s phone rings.

He’s not actually anywhere near it - he’s gotten into the habit of sitting on the front stoop and nursing a mug of tea as the sun sets, getting fresh air before he passes out in a pile of overheated limbs in the air mattress. It takes him a moment to realize his ringtone’s going off, and then another scramble to get back inside and find his phone in the mess that is his suitcases.

He doesn’t really have anywhere to unpack. Besides, it still feels weird. The house isn’t quite his, yet.

Mingyu answers the call before he can think about it, auto-pilot and slightly out of breath. “Hello?”

There’s a pause on the other end, as if the person on the other end is taken off guard. “Mingyu?”

Mingyu sits down heavily on the air mattress, which wheezes underneath him.

It’s been months, probably, but you just don’t forget the voice of the guy you spent long nights running lines in a overly-air conditioned conference room until the sun was rising over skyscrapers and you both ran out to get coffee before collapsing for a couple hour nap.

“Josh?”

There’s a low whisper of a breath being let out on the other end. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Mingyu picks at the fraying cuffs of his jeans, feeling like a deer caught in headlights. “What - um. What’s up?”

Joshua actually laughs, a familiar huff of sound even through the occasional static from being in the middle the woods. “You aren’t allowed to ask me that.”

And like that the air goes chill and still and the house makes a nervous, creaky settling noise around him.

Mingyu gnaws on his bottom lip. “Right. Yeah.”

“Just - are you alright? In one piece?” He sounds like he’s trying to joke, but Mingyu knows what Josh sounds like when he’s worried by now. “I wanted to give you some space before I called, but you know how I am.”

“I’m fine, seriously.” It probably speaks to how bad Mingyu had gotten in the last few weeks in the city that Joshua sounds that concerned. “I’m just taking a break. A getaway, you know?”

“Okay, good, right.” Joshua moves right on. “Where are you?”

“Couple hours out of the city,” Mingyu says, which might be an understatement but his skin is crawling a little, even with how much Josh usually puts him at ease. “How, um, how are things there?”

“Bullshit, obviously.” Joshua sounds tired, now that Mingyu thinks about it, worn out in the bone-deep way that long days of filming gets you. “The reporters have gone a little underground for now, but you know how they are. The second they smell something new they’ll pounce on it.”

“Yeah.” Mingyu nudges the open flap of his backpack with his toes, before giving up and just flopping back on the mattress. “Are you doing alright?”

“Oh, sure, fine. I’m not any person of interest, of course, I’ve never been signed to the company.” There’s a rustling of paper on the other end of the line, and Mingyu pictures the familiar sight of Joshua’s thin fingers flipping through the pages of a script. “Haven’t seen your name in the headlines lately, either. Not really since you left.”

Mingyu sighs, lets the air in his lungs leave him until he feels flat, deflated, before he has to breath again to respond. “That was kind of the plan.”

Joshua hums absentmindedly. “Still, a little extreme, maybe?”

“I don’t think so.” Mingyu curls up on the side that he’s not holding the phone to his ear. “You’re sure you’re alright?”

That gets a laugh. “I’m fine, seriously. The most they care about me is the fact that I have a new drama coming up soon, and they’re still wondering if I’m too old to be in these kinds of roles.”

“You, too old? That’s impossible. You could be fifty and still play the charming best friend.”

“That’s kind of the plan.” It echoes.

There’s the brush of silence, and the sound of evening birds through the still-open windows.

“I do worry about you,” Joshua says finally, quiet and careful the way he always gets. “I don’t like you out there by yourself.”

“I’m not really by myself,” Mingyu says, because it’s easier than addressing the fact that Joshua really shouldn’t be this sweet to him anymore. “I’ve met some people. Friends, I guess.”

Joshua makes an interested noise. “How are they? Do they, well, know anything?”

“They’re really nice. There’s Chan, he helps with the house a little and sometimes drives me into town, and then his friend Yebin, who’s probably way more qualified to be working on this project than me.” Mingyu sighs. “They don’t know anything. I don’t really - part of the reason I’m here is to not talk about it.”

“You won’t be able to do that forever, you know.” Joshua must be in a good mood, now, though, because he drops the point and moves forward. “The house? Project? What have you gotten yourself into, Kim Mingyu?”

“It’s just an old house.” Mingyu rolls back over to lie facing up to the ceiling. There’s the fixture to hang a chandelier in the entranceway, but no chandelier attached, and the plaster otherwise is smooth and even. “I bought it.”

“You bought a house?”

“Don’t sound so shocked. I had the money for it.”

“Sure, obviously, but still.” Mingyu can picture the way Joshua’s shaking his head. “Kim Mingyu’s growing up, already a homeowner.”

“Shut up. It’s not really like that. I, um, just wanted something different to focus on.”

“Sounds like it.”

“You’re too smug for someone who called just because he worried too much about my well-being.”

“I can’t help it. Chan and Yebin, they sound nice. Anyone else?”

An owl hoots from somewhere close to the open windows and Mingyu’s mind stutters for a second to the stranger - Minghao - peering up at him from the yard, dusty brown hair ruffled from the evening breeze.

“No one else, really. I’ve only been here a few weeks.”

“Well I’m sure you’ll branch out. You were always good at meeting new people.”

“I guess. It feels different, here.”

“I’m sure it does.” Joshua’s voice sounds like he’s smiling. “Can I visit, sometime? See the place?”

Mingyu sits up finally and heaves himself into a standing position, walks to the front door which is still hanging open. “If you want to. It’s pretty beat up right now, still. There’s a lot of work to do.”

He leans against the open door jam and listens to Joshua inhale to speak.

“Maybe in a little while, then.” There’s a pause, fragile and unsure, before Josh continues. “How long do you plan on staying there?”

And that’s the thing. Mingyu’s stomach curls in on itself, and he shifts to cover one of his feet with the other, barefoot and starting to get chilled as night moves in. “I was thinking… until next year, I think, maybe. At least until I get the house into a shape where it won’t just go back to standing around and falling apart as no one lives in it.”

He leans the side of his head on the door and imagines that the house settles, at that, reassured that it won’t be abandoned again so soon. “There’s a lot of work to do here.”

Joshua is silent for a moment after that, but the quiet is loud. Mingyu can practically hear him turning this over in his mind, digesting it, picking apart his sentences for hidden meanings that he didn’t even know he put in there.

Then, “I’ll visit for New Years,” Josh says, voice steady and sure. “You should have it in fairly good shape by then, don’t you think? It’ll be a lot to winterproof everything, if it’s as shabby as you’re making it seem.”

Mingyu hears himself make a punched-out noise, because January seems suddenly way too close. “Won’t you be busy, then? That’s still awards season.”

“I’m not too worried about missing that. I didn’t exactly have anything groundbreaking this past year. No, I want to see you, Kim Mingyu.” Josh laughs. “I’ll need to make sure you don’t freeze out there.”

“How reliable of you.”

“You were always my favorite junior, I have to take care of you.”

“Thanks. I’ll, um,” Mingyu stutters, crosses his free arm over his chest, “I’ll talk to you later, then.”

Joshua hums, assenting. “Thanks for picking up. Everyone else told me you had completely dropped off the grid, you know.”

“Not completely off - just kind of absent, temporarily.”

“I hope so. Have a good night, then. I’ll call again soon.”

“Get some sleep, Josh.”

That gets a laugh, too. “We’ll see. Bye, Mingyu.”

“See you.” Mingyu lowers his phone and clicks to hang up, and then stands looking at his phone for another few, but long, seconds before huffing and slipping it in his back pocket.

The house is strangely silent, that night.

It almost, Mingyu wonders, rolling over on the mattress to stare at the dark shape of the staircase, feels like it’s thinking.

 

One day Mingyu is standing in the kitchen, staring at the pot of almost-boiling water that he has on the stove for noodles as he waits for it to be ready, leaning against the counter next to the sink.

There’s a streak of movement out of the corner of his eye and he startles, mind flashing to Chan’s claims of ghosts and the whisper-echo of that stranger, Minghao, telling him about the house having a mind of his own.

When he whips around, heart hammering in his chest and temples, all he sees is a fat cat with soft, grey fur and a lightly squashed face sitting on the tall window that was put in the wall above the sink so you could look out over the backyard.

The cat blinks at him as he stands there dumbly, one hand actually brandishing a pair of chopsticks as if that would accomplish anything. It’s on the outside sill but Mingyu still has the windows open on the first floor at least, more for air circulation than anything else, and so the cat’s tail drifts down until it hangs, curling slightly, on the inside of the house.

A standoff with a cat is probably one of the dumbest things that Mingyu’s done in recent memory. He relaxes purposefully, lowering the hand with the chopsticks slowly.

“Hey there,” he says, watching as the cat blinks again lazily. “You from around here?”

The cat doesn’t answer, of course, just lowers its head to lick at one of its front paws.

“Okay.” Mingyu, slowly, turns back to the stove to lower the flame quickly before it boils over, water suddenly roiling and ready to go. “Just hanging out, sure. Don’t think I have anything to feed you, though,” he adds, eyeing it out of the corner of his vision as he dumps the pasta in the pot, stirring it a few times before leaving it to cook.

The cat actually yawns at him and settles in, resting its chin on its paws but keeping its eerily blue eyes open so it can watch him go through the motions of frying bacon and making carbonara sauce. The stove behaves after the pot gets to boiling, letting him cook without accidentally scorching the bottom of the pan, or suddenly extinguishing the flame just to let gas leak out before Mingyu notices it.

Sometimes that stuff happens. Mingyu’s starting to get used to it.

Mingyu eats standing up over the counter, because it still feels weird sitting at someone else’s kitchen table. The cat watches him through the whole thing, whiskers twitching when he turns on the sink to wash dishes and a few stray drops spray up at it, but it doesn’t move.

Finally, as Mingyu finishes rinsing the dish soap off of the last pan and sets it on the drying rack next to the sink, the cat pulls itself to its feet. It stretches, first into a curved arch and then out flat, chin up in the air.

Then, the cat shoots Mingyu one more look, as if assessing him, and jumps down off of the window.

The window is too high for Mingyu to see the ground right underneath it, so he doesn’t see it walk away, or what direction it goes in.

It’s probably not the worst neighbor to have, Mingyu thinks later, sitting on the porch with his hands cupped around a mug of tea. He still hasn’t quite cracked the right method to de-mice the house, after all.

The thing is that it all would have just been a funny, if strange, occurance, if it didn’t apparently kickstart a constant stream of stray cats finding their way to the house.

The next day there’s a skinny tabby with a nick in its left ear prowling the perimeter of the backyard as Mingyu attempts to string a clothesline from the house to a post in the yard that seems like it was for just that purpose, before the house fell into disrepair.

He shoots it a couple nervous looks but it doesn’t seem that interested in bothering him, and after twenty or so minutes of Mingyu getting his feet tangled in string and accidentally poking his thumb with a tack it’s gone when he looks back over.

Then there’s a black cat with one spot of white on its neck, which Mingyu and Chan find sitting on his front stoop when they get back one evening from a grocery run.

“Woah. Weird seeing a stray out so far from town,” Chan says, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as Mingyu hops down from the passenger’s seat. “Any idea whose that is?”

“Never seen it before,” Mingyu replies, pulling the brown paper bags out of the back of the truck. “I think that the old lady you talk about who lived here before must have fed them, or something. They keep showing up.”

Chan nods, although he doesn’t seem that convinced, and he keeps eyeing the cat until Mingyu finishes unloading everything.

“I’ll see you later?”

“Yeah, ‘course, have a good night.” Chan gives the cat one more searching look before shifting the truck back into drive and giving Mingyu a singular wave, grin back and steady on his face. “Try fish, I’m sure they’ll be big fans.”

Mingyu snorts and gestures with his elbow to get Chan to leave already, arms weighed down with grocery bags, but he does give the cat a curious look as he approaches the house.

“You guys are brave, around humans,” he says when he gets close enough to touch the first step with the toe of his sneaker and the cat doesn't budge. “If this is really just a long con to get fish from me then I guess I have to applaud the tenacity.”

The cat tilts its head a degree to the side as he carefully scoots past it and into the house. Mingyu gives it one more look before wiggling the fingers of his most free hand at it and closing the front door behind him.

If he makes salmon that night and thinks just a little too long before slicing off a few sashimi-thin bits to put in a small, flat dish he found in one of the china cabinets in the dining room, that’s his own business.

The cat is still there when he goes back to put the dish outside, and it immediately moves to nose at the fish in it when he sets the dish down and backs off.

Mingyu watches it eat, sharp teeth flashing in the late sun, and thinks that if cats could laugh he would be getting absolutely mercilessly teased right now.

It takes maybe too long for Mingyu to ask Chan. They’re working on the deck out back, testing the (definitely rotted) wood and weeding around it so that they can get close enough to start tearing planks out, when Mingyu thinks about it.

“You said you knew most of the people who live around here, right?” He asks, sitting back from where he had been crouched forward, tugging weeds, too look at Chan.

Chan’s holding a crowbar and looking like he can’t wait to get to the demo phase of this project when he turns and blinks. “Yeah, I’d say. Maybe not all the older folks, but definitely, like, forty and under. Why?”

Mingyu frowns, dusts dirt off the pair of thick gardening gloves Yebin had brought by one day. They’re pink, and he kind of wonders if it was some kind of mind game that she’d planned to get him to actually wear them. “No real reason. Um, someone came by the house, a few days ago. More like a week ago, actually.”

“Who?”

“Xu Minghao?”

Chan actually goes a little agape at that, eyes wide and mouth dropping open. “Minghao? Are you serious?” He falls to a squat to get face-to-face with Mingyu, dropping the crowbar next to him. “He’s back?”

Mingyu wiggles, unsure suddenly. “I don’t know about back, but he was definitely in my backyard a week ago.”

“Oh my god, I wonder if Yebin knows yet. No, wait, she would have told me, unless she’s mad at me again for something. Oh my _god,_ that dick, back in town and he didn’t even text.”

Chan whips his phone out of his pocket and actually goes through it as if there was a text that he may have missed. “I kind of wondered if he was around but I figured he would tell me. What a weirdo, seriously.” His tone is sarcastic but underlying with a warm fondness that comes with familiarity.

“You do know him, then,” Mingyu says, watching Chan seemingly have a meltdown looking through his phone.

Chan laughs. “Know him, totally, right, like I didn’t go to school with the guy every year since I was in kindergarten. I swear, all his traveling is making him weirder and weirder.” He seems to think of something, and he pauses to look at Mingyu. “What’d he say to you? Was he just checking out - the house?”

Mingyu frowns, a little, but nods. “I guess he was, yeah. He mostly wanted to know whether I bought it, and what I was doing with it. I told him I was just fixing it up,” he says, reaching to tug absentmindedly at a particularly stubborn weed that’s tried its best to grow up and actually reach through the wooden planks of the deck. “He, um. Didn’t seem to like that a ton.”

“Yeah, sounds about right.” Chan’s thumbs move lightning-quick as he sends off texts. “Don’t worry too much about him, he’s mostly harmless.”

“I wasn’t really that worried until you said that, actually.”

“I’m serious, dude, he’s just a little strange. It’s, like, endearing.”

“If you say so.” Mingyu frowns harder at the loose, dry dirt under his boots.

Chan claps him on the shoulder and then uses him as a place to boost himself back up and standing, grabbing the crowbar on his way up. “Can we start smashing stuff now? I’m dying and I also _really_ want to see if there’s anything creepy under the deck.”

There isn’t, as it turns out, anything creepy under the deck, just more weeds and some startled rabbits who come tearing out from under it as soon as they start prying off the first plank from the top. Mingyu lets Chan handle most of the actual ‘tearing things apart’ job, and just plods along with his self-appointed task of filling up waist-high paper bags with weeds and cut, dead branches, and old leaves from autumns way past.

 

Then, because Mingyu’s life is obviously just trying to create more drama where it is absolutely not necessary, thanks, he has a weak heart, he wakes up the next morning and finds Xu Minghao sitting on his front steps.

Mingyu seriously considers closing the door and going back inside but it’s too late, and Minghao twists to look up at him.

“Good morning.” His hair is pulled back in a little ponytail today, barely brushing the nape of his neck, but his bangs still wisp into his eyes. “Isn’t it a little late to be getting up?”

Mingyu glances at his watch, then back at Minghao. “It’s just past seven.”

“Right.” Minghao stretches, arms up and over his head and spine cracking, before settling his hands back in his lap. “Looks like you still have a lot of work to do, is the only thing.”

“It’s a big house.” Mingyu thinks longingly of the battered coffee maker that he’d gotten from a secondhand shop Chan had brought him to a few days ago, sitting cold and unplugged on the kitchen counter. “I’ve been making progress.”

“Sure, sure.” Minghao looks utterly comfortable sitting there, skinny arms leading up to a baggy t-shirt, material smooth enough that Mingyu knows it cost more money than it wants to look like it does, legs crossed and fingers drumming on the side of his sneakers. “Chan’s been helping you?”

“Yeah.” Mingyu crosses his arms defensively in front of him before he can think about how big a tell it is, his acting coach from ages ago echoing in the back of his mind about nonverbal language. “You know each other, I hear.”

“Everyone here knows each other.” Minghao seems softer this time, edges blurred where last time they were harsh and contrasted in the evening light. “Chan’s a good kid, though, he’ll be a lot of help.”

“Yeah, he’s great.” The pale porcelain dish that Mingyu’s made an unwilling habit out of leaving small bits of dinner on for the strays that still make their presence known every now and then is still sitting on the back corner of the step, and Minghao watches sharply as he bends down to grab it.

Mingyu straightens, and Minghao tilts his head up at him. “Have you thought about that shed yet?” Minghao asks.

“What do you mean?” Mingyu fiddles with the dish and doesn’t miss the way that Minghao’s eyes track his movements. “I told you last time, it probably needs to get completely rebuilt. That tree really did a number on it.”

Minghao nods, but doesn’t seem to really be listening to him. “I can help you clear it out, if you want. Chan won’t go near that stuff, I know,” he clarifies when all Mingyu does is just blink at him dumbly. “And you could probably use a second set of hands.”

“Last time you were here you basically tried to scare me off of doing anything to the house at all,” Mingyu says before he can really think about it. “Why are you so eager to help now?”

“Because,” Minghao says, and his knees crack when he stands up, all skinny limbs like a box of toothpicks being upended off of a kitchen counter, but once he actually stands straight the same sense of unnatural grace sinks back into his posture like a silk scarf settling around his shoulders. “I’ve changed my mind. If you’re so determined to fix this house you better have someone who actually knows what they’re doing.”

“Yebin’s been helping me with the plumbing,” Mingyu says because it’s the first thing he can think of, feeling lost as Minghao hops down the steps to the ground.

“Good, because the last thing this place needs is burst pipes from you messing with everything.” Minghao shoots him a look over his shoulder. “Are you coming?”

Because Mingyu never really grew a spine to match his height, and because ever since college (and Joshua) he’s been a soft touch for skinny ankles and pushy personalities, he obediently follows Minghao to the backyard.

“Have you tried going in yet?” Minghao throws over his shoulder, stomping through the overlong grass like he belongs there.

“Not really,” Mingyu says, hands in his pockets as he approaches the shed too. “I’ve been kind of focusing on the house itself.”

Minghao snorts a little and pulls open the door. The hinges creak, but it goes smoothly enough. “As if this doesn’t count as the house itself.”

Mingyu feels kind of lost, and also kind of like he’s definitely not in control of the situation anymore, no matter how much he actually (technically, legally, on paper) owns the house. “Okay? What do you suggest?”

“First,” Minghao says, slipping inside the shed, “Let’s get this front half cleaned out. Do you have a wheelbarrow?” he asks, turning to look at Mingyu, eyes focused and clear. “There’ll be a lot of stuff we’ll have to haul out of here.”

“Um. Yeah. Let me grab it.”

It’s weird. Minghao doesn’t talk much beyond instructing Mingyu to do things, like to help him carry a fallen rafter out to throw to the side of the shed, or to hold the shovel he’s found somewhere in the brush behind the shed while Minghao digs through one of the low shelves for who knows what.

The thing is, Minghao seems to know his way around. He pulls out half-melted candles and hunks of raw stone and eyes them like he can pull meaning from them that Mingyu can’t. Some of them go in the wheelbarrow to be trashed, and some go into a small but growing pile of ‘keeps’ that Minghao’s started in the corner of the shed.

Mingyu, for his part, mostly keeps to the sides and stays out of his way. He helps sweep up the broken glass that’s everywhere on the perimeter of the shed and drags broken shelving and dead tree limbs out to join the rest of the trash in the yard.

The morning passes like that. Slowly, awkwardly, but Minghao doesn’t address it so Mingyu definitely doesn’t either.

Eventually: “Have you always lived around here?”

Minghao looks at Mingyu like he’s broken some vow of silence that he certainly never agreed to, kneeling down by the section of tree that’s busted clean through the roof at the back of the shed. “I grew up here,” he says finally, looking back down to the ground where he’s currently trying to yank a thick, glossy wooden plank out from under the tree. “I move around for work a lot now, though. I’m only ever in town for a little at a time, these days.”

Minghao frees the plank and adds it to his ‘keep’ pile, and Mingyu adjusts his grip on the shovel he’s holding. “What do you do?”

“Consulting for a marketing company,” Minghao says absently, head bowed. “Keeps me on the road a lot. I like to come back every now and then, though, see how things are.” He looks up at Mingyu and his stare pins him in his place. “What about you?”

There’s something about the sun, high in the sky now and hot even for how they’re shaded from it by the roof right now, and the fact that Minghao seems to have a habit of unsettling Mingyu, that tips the scales unexpectedly towards honesty. “Acting, for a while,” he answers, demurring and avoiding Minghao’s gaze. “Now I’m just kind of focusing on this.”

There’s a beat where the only sound is the wheeze of insects in the grass outside and the rustle of the trees.

Finally, Minghao moves, even if it’s just to adjust his position so he can start digging through the shelving on the opposite wall than he was before. “Must have made a lot of money, to be able to retire so young.”

“I haven’t retired,” Mingyu shoots back, hackles up before he can think. “I’ll - I’ll be back eventually. It’s just a break.”

“So this _is_ just a temporary thing, then.” Minghao’s tone has gone brittle and harsh again, even for how he’s not looking up at Mingyu, focus still on pulling rusted bits of metal and stones out from the shelves.

Mingyu’s brain stutters. “I mean. I guess, sort of. But the house needs the help, right? It’d just keep on falling down if it was left alone.”

Minghao shrugs jerkily, shoulders bony through the thin fabric of his t-shirt, still not looking at Mingyu. “Sure, sure. Sometimes places like this just need to be given some space, though. If you’re not in for the long haul, isn’t it better to leave it alone entirely?”

He finally looks at Mingyu with that, eyes sharp and jaw clenched like it was back then, on the deck, motes of dust hovering around his form. “Don’t tell me this isn’t just you using it as a pet project until you get bored, or something more interesting turns up in a town with more than a couple thousand residents?”

Mingyu doesn’t really feel like he deserves that. “I’ve been here for almost a month now,” he says, and he knows his tone is too sharp but honestly he doesn’t know this guy at _all_ , but he apparently just has to listen to whatever he says? “And I’m not exactly planning on just flipping the house for a profit.”

That gets a reaction out of Minghao, for as much as a slight stiffening of his spine can constitute as a reaction. “You’re planning on living here?” he asks, tone wry and disbelieving. “What exactly has driven you all the way out here to the edge of everything, huh?”

Minghao must see something on his face, some twitch or microemotion, because his eyes sharpen and he doubles down. “What are you running away from?”

Mingyu’s grip on the shovel tightens. He feels pushed into a corner, trapped, for as much as his back is to the open door and Minghao is just sitting, posture relaxed for the most part, peering up at him from underneath wispy bangs. “I don’t think I have to tell you that.”

The air in the shed seems to vibrate, for a second, tense like a tightly-wound violin string that’s just been plucked.

Minghao shifts, rises slowly to stand. He’s not a short guy but Mingyu’s used to being tall, to feeling awkward and just slightly disproportioned for most rooms, so it just works out that Minghao has to tilt his chin just slightly, self-confidently, up to maintain eye contact.

“I think,” Minghao says, and for the first time Mingyu can hear just the tinge of accent to the tone of his words, the first sign that this isn’t his first language. “I think that you’re the type who just assumes that because he’s trying to make a clean break, to start entirely from scratch, that everything around you is also completely separate from its history.”

He takes a moment to slowly give Mingyu a once-over, eyebrows arched and unimpressed and hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, which are ripped at the knees and look too tight for him to actually fit his hands in. “You would probably benefit learning from the past. We’d hate to repeat the mistakes of history, right?”

“I don’t understand,” Mingyu manages to get out, the words feeling like they hang heavy in the air between them. “Why do you care so much about this? About this house?”

Minghao’s eyebrows do an interesting twitch and he laughs shortly, looks away and at a spot vaguely behind Mingyu. “When you grow up in a town as small as this one,” he says finally, after a moment of thought, “you tend to get protective of all of its inhabitants. Especially,” he continues, shooting one last sharp look up at Mingyu, “the ones that can’t defend themselves.”

Things deteriorate pretty quickly after that. Minghao gathers up his ‘keep’ pile, all rocks and half-candles and pieces of dried bark, and gifts Mingyu with one more sharp look before pushing past him and moving swiftly through the long grass, back to past the house.

Mingyu stands in the shed for a moment, watching him go, feeling unsettled like he missed a step on the stairs, before he lets out a long breath.

Might as well keep going.

By the time the sun starts to set the shed is completely cleared out. Mingyu didn’t really know how Minghao had been designating things worth keeping, but he also felt just a little twinge of guilt throwing everything away, so he ended up dumping all of the random detritus from the shelves into one pile on the side of the shed.

He eyed the section of the tree that laid in the back of the shed. It wasn’t huge, about wide enough around the trunk for Mingyu to be able to stretch his arms from one side to touch his fingers on the other, but the way it had fallen it was still half-connected to the trunk, where the whole thing was still firmly rooted.

The way it looked now, half of the tree was dead, dried up and collapsed, while the other half emerged from the crack whole and strong, reaching up to the rest of the treetops.

Mingyu, skin coated in a fine layer of sweat and dirt and dust, spent about thirty seconds looking at the tree trunk before letting out a defeated breath.

“Maybe we’ll address that later,” he says, under his breath. “Like next spring.”

When he finally drags the wheelbarrow of junk, filled mostly with spare tree limbs and broken planks of shelving, to the front of the house, the fat grey cat from what seems like forever ago is lying across the front step.

Mingyu eyes it warily but goes ahead and transfers everything into a trash bag before trying to approach it. “Kind of got to get past you, buddy,” he says, stepping up to the stairs but stopping before the first one.

The cat opens its eyes as if it didn’t notice him approach, which Mingyu can tell is bullshit. It stretches out, long enough that it completely covers the top step from end to end, and gives him the most unimpressed look in the history of cats.

And, ok, Mingyu is on the far end of 20. He’s not about to get intimidated by what looks for all intents and purposes like a tubby house cat. “Right, well, thanks, I’m just gonna go inside now.”

The cat stares him down as he steps carefully over it and into the house. Later, after he makes dinner and eats it over the sink, after he washes the dishes and fiddles half-heartedly with the lock to one of the sideboards in the dining room that he hasn’t yet gotten into, after he changes into a pair of sweats and a threadbare college t-shirt, he peeks out the front windows and the cat hasn’t moved.

That night, the house seems like it just won’t shut up. The walls settle and creak, the pipes go from squeaking to hissing, and the birds outside are eerily silent.

Mingyu doesn’t fall asleep until close to three in the morning.

 

The thing about living alone in a maybe haunted, definitely falling apart slowly house in the middle of nowhere is that Mingyu kind of starts to lose a frame of reference for what is and is not normal human interaction.

It was easier, in the city, because even for as much as everything he did was hemmed in and rehearsed and carefully laid out, he still had a better handle on reading other people. He could talk to them and know what they meant, what they wanted from him, how to respond in order to get what he wanted from them.

Here, in this house, all of that practice has apparently completely left him, because he has no fucking idea what Xu Minghao wants with him.

He doesn’t go away, is the thing. The day after the whole shed incident Mingyu wakes up and makes coffee and toast and goes outside to find Minghao standing in the middle of the backyard, hands on his hips, squinting up at the second floor of the house.

He’s wearing a pair of over-large glasses with thin bronze frames today, and they glint in the sun when he looks down to Mingyu. “Should we try to move that tree today?”

Mingyu blinks at him, still sleep-foggy and clutching a mug of coffee like a lifeline. “What?”

“The tree.” Minghao tips his head towards the shed. His hair is loose today, curling around his neck in humid loops, and he tosses his head to the side to sweep his fringe away from his eyes as he watches Mingyu like he’s a spooked animal. “I think we could probably at least get it to the side, enough for us to pull all that wood framing.”

“Right.”

Minghao watches him take a desperate pull of the coffee, lips thinned around an almost-frown, and then turns away a degree. “I’ll be back here toiling away when you’re ready to start, then.”

Mingyu swallows, tongue stinging from the burn of too-hot coffee, and watches as the long grass of the yard seems to bend away from Minghao by itself as he works his way back to the shed.

After a moment, which he uses to finish his coffee and rub his eyes a few times, he slips his work boots on and follows.

They manage to move the collapsed tree through a complicated process of lifting and knocking down already-broken walls and lifting a bit more. Once the tree is clear of the shed the rest of it is much the same as yesterday.

Minghao is wearing another t-shirt, this one bright and colored yellow like an egg yolk. He ends up on his hands and knees again, pulling rescued bits and pieces from the shelves that must have covered the back wall of the shed before they were crushed by the tree.

Mingyu, for his part, focuses on methodically tearing down the walls of the front half of the shed, and not looking too hard at Minghao. Something about him today is too bright, almost blinding in the late summer sun.

When that sun reaches the center of the sky, and then dips just a little lower until it’s closer to two in the afternoon, Mingyu pauses to wipe his forehead with the back of his gloved hand and glance at Minghao.

Minghao has developed some kind of organizational system that Mingyu quite honestly can’t make heads or tails of. The back shelves seemed to have held mostly potted plants and fragile glass instruments, the broken shards of which Minghao sweeps aside carelessly while picking dried up leaves out of the mess and making three neat piles on the wooden shed floor.

Mingyu leans against the shovel that he’s been using to pry the unsteady shelves off of the walls with and watches Minghao carefully pluck a few wispy stems of some kind of flower, petals dried up and blown away by now, out of the wreckage before he wills his voice out from some quiet space behind his ribs. “Do you want lunch?”

Minghao freezes, thin fingers sifting through one of his piles, and he glances up at Mingyu. “Um.”

He looks completely taken aback, and something about that uncertainty and the crooked angle of his knuckles makes Mingyu abruptly, stupidly, just a little fond. “I can make something.”

Minghao follows Mingyu through the back door of the house hesitantly, light-footed in a way that puts Mingyu in the mind of startled animals, wary and off-put by where they’ve ended up.

“You’ve definitely cleaned it up a bit,” is the first thing Minghao says, slipping his dirty sneakers off at the door and padding after Mingyu into the kitchen.

“Yeah.” Mingyu regards the clean tile and counters of the kitchen with pride before he opens the still a little unreliable refrigerator to dig out ingredients. “I figured if I wanted to cook at all I better make sure this room was cleaner than any of the others, you know?”

Minghao ran a careful hand over one of the counters, mouth pursed. “Makes sense.” He watches Mingyu rummage around the fridge, pulling out stuff for sandwiches and a kind of wimpy-looking salad. “You cook a lot.”

Mingyu glances at him in the middle of pulling out a cutting board and a knife. “I guess. How’d you know?”

“You’re actually using all this stuff.” Minghao makes a vague gesture to the pots hanging from the rack above the stove, the silverware drawer, the pitcher sitting next to the sink with spatulas and other utensils in it. “And there’s dirty dishes in the sink. You don’t usually see that if all you’re doing is using the same plate each night for pizza.”

“True.” Mingyu wants to laugh, but the moment still feels weird and delicate. “Water?”

“Sure, thanks.” Minghao’s eyes are sharp, seeming to see way more than just Mingyu ducking back into the fridge to grab a bottle from the side of the door. “You haven’t asked again.”

“Asked what?”

“Why I care so much about the house. The garden shed, the - all of it.” Minghao’s fingers still tap against the counter but his eyes have flicked away, down, to the side so they’re inspecting the dirty glass of the small window above the sink.

Mingyu assembles two identical sandwiches slowly, methodically, before he answers. “It didn’t work out so well last time I tried,” he finally says, and it feels like a peace offering when he slides the one plate across the counter, towards Minghao. “I was a little surprised you showed up this morning after that.”

“I noticed.” Minghao doesn’t reach for the sandwich until Mingyu takes his plate and brings it over to the kitchen table, and then he follows.  
It figures that the first time he used it would be with an almost-complete stranger, this table that still bears scratch marks and water stains from a family long past.

Mingyu lets the subject drop, or maybe Minghao does, and either way they sit and eat lunch and then go back out to the backyard as the sun is high and full in the sky.

Minghao finishes bundling up his piles into small plastic grocery bags that he must have brought with him, and then they start making short work of busting down the walls.

The shed is old and not exactly built to withstand more than the occasional rain and snow, and the fact that it was exposed on the outside and inside to the elements for who knows how long has made the wood dry and easy to break.

Mingyu half-expects to do most of the work himself but Minghao tags along gamely, his clenched jaw the only sign that he’s maybe less than happy to be tearing it down. By the time the sun is less blistering and bright Mingyu’s made three trips back to the kitchen for more water, and the only parts of the shed still standing are one section of the left wall that Minghao had said he wanted to look at again, and then the wooden floor.

Mingyu stretches and touches the back of his neck tenderly with one hand. “I really need to invest in some sunscreen,” he says, more to himself than to Minghao. “I’m getting burnt out here.”

Minghao twitches and gives him a look, careful, assessing behind the glasses that he’s wearing. “Is it bad?”

“Dunno, it’s mostly my neck,” and he bends his head down and away from Minghao to show it off. “Does it look awful?”

He’s looking away, down, and so Mingyu doesn’t see it when Minghao closes the distance between them, standing on the bare floor of the shed without walls, and reaches up to touch the back of his neck.

His fingertips are almost shockingly cold, which is probably a sign that Mingyu’s way more sunburnt than he thought. He doesn’t really do more than rest two fingers on the back of his neck, but he’s close enough that Mingyu can see the way he gnaws at his bottom lip for a beat, eyebrows furrowed before speaking.

“That’s going to blister,” he says finally, and withdraws his hand. Mingyu tries to tell his stomach not to make such a big deal out of the motion, but it only half-works. “You - did you not notice?”

Mingyu shrugs, feeling a little like a scolded kid. “I was kind of in the zone, I guess.”

Minghao shakes his head but he looks on the edge of smiling, and he hops off the base platform of the shed to grab one of the tied-off grocery bags that he’d stowed away in the shade of a nearby tree. “You’re really putting your all into this.”

“I don’t really have anywhere else to be putting my all into.”

Minghao’s mouth twitches like he wants to say something before apparently thinking better of it, and he just unties the bag to rummage through it. After a moment he pulls a handful of something out of it, more dried leaves and bare stems that he rescued from the back shelves underneath the tree, and he presents it to Mingyu.

“Do you have any, like, vaseline? Or lotion?”

“Um. Probably?”

“Okay, good.” Minghao ties off the bag using his teeth and his free hand and drops it with the rest, then takes off to the house without another word.

Mingyu, obviously, scrambles to follow, because what else is he to do?

Inside, Minghao opens half of the bottom cabinets in the kitchen before digging out what he’d been looking for - a dusty, antique-looking food processor.

“A mortar and pestle would work better,” he says, plugging it into an outlet on the wall and detaching the bowl so he can rinse it quickly in the sink. “Who knows where those ended up after they closed up the estate, though. Probably the attic.”

Mingyu watches, hands useless by his sides, as Minghao dumps his handful of dead plants into the food processor and starts to pulse it. “Have you been up there?”

The food processor makes an awful grinding noise as it goes, like the entire unit is fighting itself to actually function, and Minghao has to raise his voice to be heard over it. “Once or twice,” he says, mouth twisted up in a wry grin. “I knew the woman who used to live here.”

“Old lady Wu?”

Minghao’s mouth goes even twistier, like he sucked a lemon, and he gives the food processor on last, screeching pulse before unplugging it and popping the lid off the bowl. “Sure. Here, grab me your lotion.”

It takes Mingyu a little while to dig up a thing of face cream from the bottom of his suitcase, unused since he moved out here, and Minghao inspects the label when he hands it over.

“This stuff is expensive,” he says, and peers up at Mingyu through his eyelashes, through the thick lenses of his glasses. When Mingyu just kind of shrugs and offers no explanation he opens it and taps a tablespoon or so of the cream into a bowl, then adds a pinch of the pulverized dead leaves.

The mixture turns a kind of dirty green color when it’s all mixed, and Minghao catches Mingyu giving it a wary look as he picks some up with his fingers.

“Don’t give me that,” Minghao tsks, and uses one hand to pull Mingyu’s head down so his chin touches his chest while his other one carefully spreads some of the cream on the back of his neck. “This’ll help a lot.”

And it does, almost immediately. Mingyu actually lets out a breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding as the stinging tightness of the burn melts away, not exactly cooling but certainly no longer quite so hot.

Minghao goes quiet as he covers the whole back of Mingyu’s neck. He dots the tips of his ears, even, which - yeah. Mingyu might need to rapidly re-examine some things about this whole situation.

“Better?”

Mingyu starts and looks up, back at Minghao. “Yeah, um. What did you _put_ in that?”

“It’s like herbs that, you know, promote healing, and all that.” Minghao turns away to set the little bowl of the leftover cream on the counter, then goes to the sink to wash his hands. “Use the rest of that next time you get all blistery. It’s not a good look to have all your skin peeling off.”

“Right, of course.”

“Can’t have a fancy actor looking like a snake trying to shed.”

“I _get_ it, geez.”

 

Minghao doesn’t come by every day. Some days Mingyu wakes up early, half-expecting to see Minghao sitting on the front stoop, or the bare platform of the shed that they’ve left alone since tearing everything else down, but he never shows.

Chan still comes by pretty regularly, toting Yebin along more often than not. They make short work of the front yard one day, getting at least that much of the grass cut short.

At one point they run over a hunk of rusted metal and almost break the mower, which Chan had ‘borrowed’ from the parks department’s garage, and when Mingyu lugs it off the ground to inspect it it just kind of looks like a really old coffee tin.

He tries to open the lid, and then Chan tries, and then Yebin gives it one more shot before declaring it impossible and suggesting that they try to hammer the lid out of shape so they can open it. Mingyu, for some reason, doesn’t really think that’s a good idea.

“Maybe it’s a landmine,” Chan says over Mingyu’s shoulder as they peer at it. “Maybe old lady Wu really didn’t want kids on her lawn.”

“Don’t joke about that, I’m still nervous I’m going to find, like, arsenic in the bathroom cabinets or something.” Yebin shakes her head and wanders off to tinker with something else, tossing one more comment over her shoulder as she goes: “Trash it, Mingyu.”

Mingyu laughs with Chan and goes back to the yard work he’s still working on, but if the coffee tin finds its way to Minghao’s ‘keep’ pile then who does it really bother?

Other days, Minghao shows up like clockwork just after eight in the morning. They get into a routine with it, sort of, on these kinds of days.

Mingyu drinks coffee and watches Minghao sort through his piles of junk on the wooden base to the garden shed. Mingyu can’t really make heads or tails of his organizational structure - assuming there is one. He kind of just makes a few different piles, picking through one huge pile in the middle, and mostly everything is either dead plants or just trash.

Then, Mingyu will finish his coffee, rinse the mug and leave it in the sink, and trail out to meet Minghao in the backyard.

Minghao will glance at him as he approaches and start sweeping his piles into plastic grocery bags, leaving the big pile untouched. “Ready to get started?” he’ll ask more often than not, standing up with the crack of joints.

Then he’ll cover the big pile with a circular grill cover that Mingyu and Chan found during their lawn mowing adventures, hop off the platform, and lead the way.

Mingyu stopped trying to direct him to what he’d been planning on working on that day after the first couple of times that Minghao just ignored him and busted into the sitting room, or the office, or the crawl space under the stairs.

“You just have to listen to what the house wants,” Minghao says one day, completely incomprehensible, head underneath the master bathroom sink like he’s trying to just take up residence in the space completely.

“And today it wants to get its pipes prodded a bunch?” Mingyu was sitting perched on the edge of the large bathtub on the side of the bathroom, underneath a window. “Yebin already declared this one all good to go, even the bath faucet. What are you trying to do?”

Minghao shushes him and withdraws from under the sink with a smear of rust on his forehead and a determined expression. “Does the hot water work, too?”

“Yes?” Mingyu gets up to demonstrate, and Minghao watches him like he can’t turn a faucet on unsupervised. “Does that mean something?”

Minghao hums and doesn’t answer in the least, turning instead to rifle through the medicine cabinets above the double sink.

He does manage to get the coffee tin open, a week or so after Mingyu and Chan first dig it out of a tangle of weeds after its brief brush with destruction.

“Where did you find this?” Minghao asks, clutching the can between his knees while he pries at the lid. “I haven’t seen one of these in _ages_.”

“It was just kind of sitting in the yard,” Mingyu says, hands twisting in his lap and thinking about the pork he has marinating in the fridge and not the way that Minghao’s hair looks a little darker today, like it’s reflecting the slow descent into fall that they’re rapidly approaching. It suits him. “We almost ran it over with the lawn mower.”

Minghao barks out a laugh at that, and it’s maybe the loudest sound Mingyu’s heard him make, yet. It’s rivaled almost immediately by the way Minghao crows proudly when the lid finally pops off, releasing in a puff of dirt.

“There we go,” he says, tossing the lid to the side and dumping the can out on the shed floor which has quickly become Minghao’s unofficial workstation. “What do we have in this one?”

What they have turns out to be a bunch of scraps of dry paper, a stubby bit of blue chalk, and a length of twine with a rusty washer tied to one end.

Of course, Minghao loves it all.

Mingyu fiddles with his phone and half-heartedly shoots Josh a text while Minghao works in silence, sorting through the paper and organizing it in some order.

The texting thing is something he’s trying, these days. It’s a little less gut-wrenching than actually hearing Josh’s voice, the disappointment and wary hope and familiar husk of it when he’s overworked and shot too many scenes in one day.

In texts, at least, the most he has to contend with are carefully prodding questions, and a tendency for Joshua to toss too many emoticons to the end of his messages.

3:41 PM

    _Filming’s on break right now, it started raining._

_Remind me why I ever agree to do shows that are mostly shot outside?_

3:50 PM

_because you love a good slice of life comedy_

_and those are always 50% just walking back and forth on sidewalks_

4:02 PM

    _You’re right, I just love having to drop everything the second there’s a drop of moisture._

_What are you up to? How’s the project?_

4:05 PM

_slow_

_getting somewhere, though._

4:08 PM

_hey josh_

_what does it mean if you’re pretty sure a guy hates you but he keeps showing up at your house_

4:13 PM

    _Kim Mingyu, you just described like half of the shows you were in._

_I think you know._

“There we go.”

Mingyu looks up from his phone and blinks at Minghao, who’s sitting cross-legged surrounded by small horizontal lines of ripped paper and looking triumphant as anything. “Huh?”

“Finished it.” Minghao props his hands palm-up on his knees and shakes his hair out of his eyes. It’s gotten longer, and it’s definitely starting to fade towards a darker brown, now that Mingyu really looks at it. “Guess what this is.”

Mingyu tips his head and eyes the paper, then glances up at the sky where the clouds are starting to hang grey and heavy over them. That rain that Josh mentioned must have made its way to them by now. “Soon-to-be mush, probably.”

Minghao waves his hand dismissively. “It’ll hold off for a little while still.” He scoops the papers back together and dumps them back in the coffee can anyways.

The string he’s tied around his wrist, washer hanging heavily from it and rubbing orange stains into the pale skin on the underside of the joint. The chalk he tossed to the side pretty early, but now he grabs it and then grabs Mingyu’s hand, the one that’s not holding the phone.

Mingyu lets himself get yanked. He’s past the point of fighting these things, now, and the winky face that Josh had tacked onto the end of that last text he sent is haunting him a little.

“The woman who used to live here,” Minghao explains, flipping Mingyu’s hand so it faces palm-up, fingers loosely curled. “People in the town would visit her all the time for little things. Colds that linger too long, colicky babies, poison ivy. She could fix those things with almost nothing, just scraps.”

He straightens out Mingyu’s fingers and starts tracing a circle in the cup of his palm, about as large as a quarter. “One time,” he says, “I was really young, and she actually mended someone’s broken arm with just some chalk and a really strong tea. I always thought it was amazing,” Minghao continues, and the words have gone a little wistful as he draws another circle on the outside of the first, this one as large as he can fit it on Mingyu’s hand. “To be able to do things like that with just intention and a pinch of dirt.”

Mingyu lets Minghao draw a couple lines connecting the two circles, one in the nine o’clock position and one in the two o’clock, at least from his viewpoint. “I didn’t really realize that there were those kind of people still around, these days. You know,” he clarifies when Minghao looks up at him with furrowed, defensive eyebrows. “Like, natural healers, or whatever.”

Minghao’s mouth goes funny, like it wants to smile but won’t. “Some people call them witch doctors.”

“I thought that was, like, a bad term.”

“Sure,” Minghao says, shrugging and going back to tracing a few more thin lines from circle to circle. “It gets misused a lot. For her, though,” and his voice goes wispy again. “It was more accurate than not.”

The air starts to press into his skin with the tingle of incoming storms, and Mingyu watches as Minghao smudges out the larger circle until it’s a blue halo, stark against Mingyu’s palm.

Minghao isn’t wearing glasses today, just a pale blue t-shirt with a stretched out neckline and a pair of jeans, these ones with rips just a bit higher in the thighs, above the knees, and his hair soft and darker and tangling in his eyelashes as he focuses.

Mingyu’s phone buzzes in his other hand, and the first raindrop falls.

It lands, like a stone, inside that inner circle on Mingyu’s palm, and as he watches Minghao’s eyes lose almost all of their sharpness at the corners.

That night Mingyu’s dreams are full of careful fingertips and the amount of devotion you’d have to have to press bitter tea into someone’s hands and for them to trust you.

 

The next morning the storm has passed when Mingyu wakes up and stumbles to the coffee maker, rubbing his eyes with one hand and examining the smudged blue stains on the other. The circles are almost completely smudged, even though the chalk really should be gone entirely, considering how many times he’s washed his hands by now.

A grumpy meow interrupts his thoughts, which weren’t going anywhere good anyways, and he glances up to see a speckled cat sitting on the windowsill above the sink. It regards him with interested green eyes and rubs its chin against the upper edge of the window.

“Oh. You’re a new one,” Mingyu says, blinking at the cat a few times.

It keeps looking at him and there’s something impatient about it, enough so that Mingyu actually lets out a gusty sigh, puts down his coffee, and pushes the window up and open.

Almost immediately the cat leaps down and onto the counter, making Mingyu swear when it comes to land just and inch away from the mug, before padding across the counter and then jumping down to the kitchen floor.

“Hey, um, hold on.” Mingyu follows it close behind, kind of not wanting to get _too_ too close, in case it decided to stop playing nice and scratch him or something. “You don’t live here.”

The cat gives him a completely withering look over its shoulder before hopping gracefully onto his air mattress and then continuing right over it, to the front door where it sits and regards him from across the room.

“What, just using the house as a shortcut?” Mingyu shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair, which is still mussed up with bedhead. “I feel like I’m being taken advantage of.”

The cat just sits and watches him as he approaches, whiskers twitching when he gets near enough to open the door.

Mingyu opens it wide, letting the cat slip past his ankles and slink down the front stairs. It takes a sharp right, then, and wanders off into some of the tall grass to the side of the immediate front yard that Mingyu and Chan haven’t quite tackled yet.

“Have a great day,” Mingyu shouts after it. If you’re living in a maybe haunted, definitely not normal house in the middle of the woods by yourself, you’re allowed to start talking to cats. “See you next time you’re passing through.”

He moves to close the door, sparing just a glance down at the ground. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, really - all that’s down there is a few brave weeds that are trying to grow up again through the soil, plus plenty of stray rocks.

That absence of anything is what makes Mingyu pause before shutting the door. He frowns down at the ground, mind racing clumsy with sleep, when the thought finally reaches him.

Yesterday, there had been a pile of the various, mostly metal, trinkets that Minghao had pulled from the long grass and dusty cabinets in the house and declared ‘keeps’. It was a hodge-podge mix of candlesticks and paper weights and rings to hold napkins together, and he had left it right next to the stairs to take with him.

“Once I remember to bring a box over here,” Minghao had said, distracted as he rubbed at one of the candlesticks with the hem of his shirt. He got dirt and rust on his shirt, and the candlestick seemed mostly unbothered about the whole situation.

Now, the pile is gone.

Mingyu finds himself half-running back through the house, through the entranceway and the kitchen and out the back door, heart tripping over itself as he goes.

The things on the wood floor of the shed are gone, too. The only sign that they were even there in the first place is a few outlines on the wood where rain soaked through everywhere but where plastic bags sat.

There’s a perfect, dry circle in the middle of the floor, the exact size of that grill lid.

He calls Chan before he can think of anything else, just rushed dialing and listening to the phone ring. He forgets it’s so early, still, the sunlight thin and watery through the canopy of trees as Mingyu sits anxiously on the front step, but eventually the phone picks up.

“Why are you _awake_ ,” Chan whines in his ear, voice rusty like he’s still asleep. “What’s wrong, is the house burnt down, do I have to rescue you?”

“Did Minghao leave?” The words come out before Mingyu can give them much thought. He feels a little like he was betrayed, like somehow Chan coaxed the words out of him, or Minghao took up residence in the space behind his sternum and forced it out.

There’s a pause, and a rustling like Chan’s getting out of bed. “Why, did he owe you money?” he jokes, and there’s some more sounds in the background before a door closes. “Yeah, he had to go back for a work thing. Has to fly out tonight, I guess, he just texted me last night to give him a ride to the train station.”

“Oh.” And that shouldn’t feel as much of a shock as it is. Minghao travels, that’s the thing he’s known about him the longest, right before the fact that Minghao is weird as fuck. Still, his palm itches, and he rubs it on the knee of his flannel pants before he can think about it. The chalk doesn’t come off. “Sorry, um. I just realized he took the stuff he left here.”

“Oh, true, I forgot he probably found all kinds of things in the house.” Chan turns a faucet on, and there’s some splashing before it turns back off. “He likes his collections.”

Mingyu just hums in low response, picking at a loose thread on the cuff of his pants now. “Do you know much about all that? That, like, alternative medicine, or whatever.”

“Minghao’s witchy shit?” The curse is a little too harsh for the early morning, but Chan says it so fondly that it buffers most of the blow. “Not really. He’s always kind of been like that. Runs in the family, I think?”

“The rest of his family was like that too?”

Chan coughs, the sound explosive through the crappy cell phone reception. “Yeah, um. Like, extended family, I guess. Either way,” he continues, “I wouldn’t expect him back in for a while, probably. When he’s here he’s here, and when he disappears it kind of just comes and goes how he wants it to.”

“Right.” Mingyu eyes the bend of the gravel road, where it turns away from the house and out of sight past the trees. “Thanks.”

Later, much later, after eating a definitely not depressing bowl of cereal and washing all of the dishes that have accumulated somehow in the sink (cooking for two is messier, and that fact sits heavy in Mingyu’s chest), he heads out to the back.

He finally strips the last standing section of wall off of where it stood, eyeing the wood with unease before he sets it aside. The base floorboards look raw, exposed like this, empty and starting to soak up warmth from the sun.

After a good minute of standing, staring, at the floor, crowbar loosely held in one hand, Mingyu shakes his head and grabs the section of wall. He totes it back to the house and finds an empty corner of a storage closet off of the main entrance to stow it in.

The shed flooring he leaves, facing up to the sky, bare among the grass and trees.

Before long Mingyu has to accept the fact that autumn is slowly but surely encroaching into the space that summer is leaving behind as it slips away in thunderstorms and cooling nights. The house loses most of the stuffy mustiness that he found it with, and most of the windows end up closed on all but the hottest of days.

The trees start to go first. It’s like one day they’re the same brilliant green, and the next they’re half red, half yellow, with tinges of orange all around and in between.

Mingyu sits on his front stoop, looks up at the treetops, and sighs heavily in preparation for the amount of raking he sees in his future.

The leaves fall light as rain, but only seem to do so when he’s not looking. He’ll turn around and suddenly the front yard is blanketed in a layer of red-orange-brown leaves, dry and curling up until rain hits and soaks them through, plastering them to the ground.

Mingyu invests in a better pair of work boots and some more yard trimming bags.

Chan helps, kind of. Most of his help consists of sitting on the back of his truck and shouting encouragement across the way to Mingyu, in between flipping through a bright pink and yellow teen magazine he found who knows where.

“Is your ideal guy tall dark and handsome, or the funny class clown? This is important, Mingyu, the results of this quiz could define your entire love life.”

Mingyu rakes particularly enthusiastically at the same spot in the yard for a few moments before settling back on his heels and letting out a breath. “Can we go back to the questions about my favorite flavor of ice cream?”

“Absolutely not. I’m going to just go ahead and mark the option for indecisive jerks like you, then,” Chan declares, and actually ticks some kind of box on the magazine with a pen. “Ooh, there’s a whole section on most embarrassing stories.”

Mingyu snorts and keeps raking, leaning down to pick up and toss aside a fallen section of tree branch. “I think I could beat some of those.”

Chan actually giggles and kicks his feet against the side of the truck. “You sure? Some of these are _amazing._ ”

Mingyu thinks, maybe too fondly, of a particularly awful day of filming where he had managed to knock the starlet he was acting against into a nearby pond not once but _twice_ , shortly followed by him falling in on the next take they tried. “I’d put money on it.”

Chan shakes his head, still grinning, and fans through some more of the pages as Mingyu starts stuffing his latest pile of leaves in one of the brown paper bags for lawn trimmings. “God, is it a sign that I’m old or that I’m just more backwoods than I thought, that I don’t know any of these people?”

“Can’t you be both?”

“Oh shut up, you’re getting grumpy in your final days. Have you found any grey hairs yet? I read somewhere that exposure to spirits can induce them early, but I’m sure it’s just your time by now.” Chan skims the page he’s landed on. “Like, Kim Nayoung? Hong Jisoo? Yoon Jeonghan? Whatever happened to the people that were on kids shows when we were growing up, and who are these pretty imposters?”

He thwaps the magazine with the back of one of his hands to punctuate, and Mingyu keeps his head down as he gets the last of the leaves in the paper bag.

Then, he clears his throat. “What’s the article on?”

Chan tilts the magazine to one side, and then his head to the other. “No clue. I think it’s just a bunch of pictures of outfits they’ve all worn to the airport lately. I’ll give Hong Jisoo this, the guy knows how to style a cardigan.”

That surprises a laugh out of Mingyu, and he covers it with a quick cough into his sleeve.

Some things were right in the world, then, if Josh was still dressing like an elderly librarian and calling it fashion.

After the leaves start to fall it’s like the world suddenly remembers that oh yeah, winter is on it’s way, better hurry everything up to meet it halfway there. The nights dip down uncomfortably cold, instead of just kind of a pleasant break between sweaty days, and Mingyu digs out some dusty quilts from a closet in the master bedroom.

“Please don’t be murder blankets,” he mutters to himself, shirtsleeves rolled up above his elbows as he handwashes them in the bathtub. “I really can’t deal with murder blankets.”

There’s no washer or dryer in the house, because of course there isn’t, and the bathtub has kind of come in handy. Now that the temperatures are dropping things take a bit longer to dry on the mangled drying line he hung up in the backyard, but everything works.

 

Well. Most things work.

One day in late September he finds Yebin at the hardware store on his way to pick up wood varnish for some of the dressers and shelves, and she recommends him a contact to look into the furnace.

“Your hot water heater is functioning at least, thank goodness,” she says as she bags up his purchases, hands quick. “Hopefully that’ll last through the winter. Dongho is good, though, reliable. He knows his shit.”

Mingyu takes the scrap of paper that she writes the phone number on and nods. “Thanks. I’m really not trying to freeze once it hits November.”

“Oh, you’ll need it before then.” Yebin flips her hair over her shoulder, which she recently must have gotten bleached because it’s a pale blonde now. “That deep in the woods, with the mountains nearby, things start getting pretty brisk around here by mid-October.”

Mingyu laughs, thinking wistfully of the heated floors in his apartment back in the city. Sure, winters there were bitter and mostly awful, but at least he could count on not freezing once he was home. “Thanks. I’ll give him a call.”

Dongho turns out to be a round-faced guy with short hair and biceps big enough that Mingyu feels a little ridiculously inadequate almost immediately, considering he barely knows the guy. He’s nice, though, almost to a fault, and he spends a few days clattering around in the little storage room off the side of the house where the furnace sits.

A few of the cats stop by to see what’s going on, and Mingyu catches them more than once trying to sneak up on Dongho, only to go prickly-furred and hissing when he turns around.

The fat grey one, though, that first one doesn’t seem to care at all. Mingyu watches it stroll right up to Dongho, who’s covered in soot and amazingly not cursing, and rub up against his calf.

Mingyu half-expects Dongho to be surprised by the attention, but he just kind of grins shyly and ducks down to stroke the cat’s back, then scratch under its chin when it tips its head up at him.

“I had cats growing up,” Dongho explains, tips of his ears flushing as he lets the cat rub its squashed face up against his knuckles. “They’re nice. They don’t always need attention, but when they want it they make it feel like an honor, you know?”

Mingyu crouches down next to him, and sort of knows.

The furnace ends up taking more time than they thought, and costs a decent chunk for replacement parts. It seems that fixing the current furnace, old and weathered and out of date, costs more than just throwing in the towel and buying a new one.

Mingyu listens to Dongho break the numbers down for him and nods, but ends up shaking his head.

“I, um, don’t like changing too much about the house as it was,” he says, hands shoved in his jean pockets. “I’d like to preserve as much as possible.”

Dongho gives him an appraising look before sighing, shrugging, and patting him on the arm. “Great. Hope you like the cold a little bit, though,” he continues, tone going a little dry. “Some of these parts have to get shipped in from overseas. It’ll be a few more weeks before I can get this thing kicking.”

“Sure, sounds fine.”

It ends up being a month, maybe longer. Yebin was right - things get cold by October 4th. After that, it’s just downhill.

Mingyu sets to winter proofing the house with the same single minded focus he took to yard work during the summer. He checks the windows for drafts and finds them in surprisingly good shape, and he finally fills a spare cabinet that he found shoved in the corner of the sitting room with the contents of his suitcase.

It still feels too weird to sleep in either of the bedrooms. Chan helps him clear a space in the dining room large enough to lay out the air mattress, taking out one of the panels from the long dining table and pushing it up against the wall to make room.

His morning tea on the porch continues, though. Routines have always helped him, and now Mingyu makes sure to be wearing shoes and socks, plus a scarf once the first frost hits, before he goes outside.

The cats don’t come by every day, but more days than not. The gray one is starting to become his favorite, not that he would actually agree to that if someone were to ask him.

It makes a habit of wandering up as if it’s an accident, as if it’s surprised to see Mingyu there, even though Mingyu is _always_ there. The way its nose is pressed into its face a little gives it a vague air of superiority as it prowls around the front yard before inevitably coming to curl up on the bottom step, just a couple feet away from Mingyu.

Mingyu hides a smile in his mug and lets the steam warm his cheeks.

Joshua calls, still, although Mingyu hears from him less often than he does the cats.

“How’s the house?” He asks every time, because Joshua is nothing if not the master of casual yet pointed small talk.

“It’s amazing, fantastic, definitely an up and coming high-end condo level of elegance,” Mingyu says as he tries to shove a wad of newspapers in a vent that seems to be doing nothing but pumping ice-cold air straight into the sitting room. “Truly the limits of luxury, over here.”

That gets him a warm Joshua laugh in his ear. It’s probably good, that Mingyu’s stomach doesn’t go all wiggly and strange these days when he hears that, but it’s still nicer to listen to than maybe it deserves. “Well it sounds like you’ve really found your new calling in life, Kim Mingyu.”

“They should get me a show.” Mingyu finally manages to pop the vent cover back on, now mostly-blocked with paper, which will do for now, before falling backwards to land on his ass. “On that home decorating channel, or whatever it is.”

“I thought you were done with cameras for a little while?”

“Don’t - you know what I mean.”

“I know, sorry.” Mingyu listens to the silence on the other end of the line for a few beats, watching the newspaper in the vent move just slightly from the little bit of air that manages to get through. “Whatever happened to that guy?”

“What guy?”

“The one that was throwing rocks at your window, or holding a stereo above his head, or whatever.”

Mingyu snorts and hauls himself up to his feet. “You really have been watching too many bad American movies, Josh.”

Josh tsks at him, and Mingyu can almost feel the ghost of a pinch at his side, as if they were in person. “You know who I’m talking about, though. What happened with all that?”

Mingyu wanders off to check on the onions and peppers he’d pulled out a few minutes ago, putting them on the cutting board before promptly getting distracted by the stray chill that wafted in from the other room. “He left.”

“Left?”

“Like, for work, I guess.” Mingyu turns the phone over to speaker mode and leaves it on the counter as he runs the peppers under the water, which Yebin has recently declared safe for most things, and then takes to chopping them. “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.”

Josh is suspiciously silent for a moment before replying. “You liked him, though?”

“Sort of. Sure. I don’t, Josh, I don’t really need the third degree right now.” Mingyu gets a little too forceful chopping the pepper into thin strips, but he keeps his fingers out of the way at least. “Can we talk about something else?”

“If you insist.” There’s a rush of air as Joshua lets out a breath. “The suit closed today.”

The knife freezes mid-air and Mingyu blinks blankly. “It did?”

“Yeah. Over five million in settlement fees, plus they have to dismantle both the executive cabinet and the board if they want to keep operating under the same label. It’s all anyone’s talking about these days.”

Mingyu places the knife carefully on the edge of the cutting board and grips the counter with both hands. “And the signed artists?”

“Nothing public, but it sounds like they’re all being offered buy-outs if they don’t want to stay with the label.” Outside the window over the sink a grey bird flies down and lands on the post holding up the drying line, as if it hasn’t gotten the memo yet that winter is slowly but surely approaching. “A few are coming over to my company, I hear.”

“That’s good.” The bird twitches its head to the side and ruffles its wings against its side before taking off again. He hopes that it has somewhere warm to sleep this season, or else has friends to fly further south with. It seems almost too late, for all that.

There’s some rustling on the other side of the line, as if Josh adjusts his position holding the phone, and when he speaks again he sounds so bone-deep tired that Mingyu briefly aches for him before remembering that he can’t do that anymore. “People miss you, you know.”

Mingyu tightens his grip on the counter and shifts his line of sight so he’s staring down at the half-cut pepper on the cutting board. “I don’t really know why.”

“Don’t be stupid, of course people are going to miss you.”

“I’m not being stupid, I just - you know how things got towards the end, Josh.”

“I do.” Joshua sounds thoughtful, and sad. “I wish you’d let me help more.”

“You couldn’t really do much. It was all stuff I had to deal with myself.”

“Doesn’t mean I couldn’t be there for you to talk to.”

“That’s - I wouldn’t have wanted it, then.” Or he would have wanted it too much, and gotten heart-bruised for how much he couldn’t have it. “I made it pretty clear that I needed space.”

“I suppose.” The house shifts and creaks around Mingyu, familiar now after so long living there. “Doesn’t stop me from wanting things to have gone differently, though.”

Mingyu laughs, the sound bitter and dry. “Join the club.”

“Mingyu.” It’s vaguely scolding, but in the warm way that Josh manages to make most things he says sound. “Can I still visit, later on in the winter?”

“Sure. I’ll even try to have a working furnace for you, by then.”

Joshua makes a startled noise and takes right off into a tangent about how Mingyu needs to take care of himself and not get sick, and does he need Josh to send him some tea and hot packs and socks, which is exactly what Mingyu had been hoping for.

It’s easier to deal with Josh when he’s being predictable. It’s much harder when he takes him by surprise.

While he waits for the furnace to get fixed Mingyu decides that now is as good of a time as any to finally tackle the problem that is the boarded-up fireplace. His initial survey of the situation turns out to be true, and he can just kind of break through the thin balsa wood before tugging it all free of the stone mantle.

Removing the wood reveals a metal grate for holding logs, as well as a kind of ridiculously-huge pile of ash.

“How is this all still here?” Mingyu wonders aloud, using one of the broken pieces of wood to poke and sift through the pile. The ashes are silk-soft and crumble as soon as they’re touched, and they fill up almost the entire bottom of the fireplace. “Shouldn’t this have blown away by now?”

That leads him to his next problem, shortly after scooping most of the ash out and into a trashcan, which leads him even more quickly to the problem of getting onto the roof.

“We could try putting a ladder in the bed of my truck,” Chan says, using one hand to block sun from his eyes as he and Mingyu both peer up at the top of the house. The sun is still bright, for all that there’s still a heavy layer of frost in the air.

Mingyu shifts from foot to foot in his boots and thick wool socks and rubs his hands together. It’s not like he hasn’t had colder, and longer, times spent outside, but things seem damper and therefore more uncomfortable this deep in the woods. “That definitely sounds safe.”

“I would put the car in _park_ , obviously.” Chan rolls his eyes and drops his hand to prop both fists on his hips, turning to look at Mingyu. “Up to you. Or we could just leave the chimney completely blocked like it is now, and then you turn into a popsicle in a few weeks. Either way sounds good to me.”

“There’s a window up high in the back,” Yebin pipes up from behind them. “Where does that go to?”

“Huh?” Mingyu and Chan follow her around the side of the house until they can see the window she’s pointing at. It’s small and circular, maybe three feet in diameter at best, positioned in the center of the top of the house. There’s a small, probably decorative, balcony coming off of it, with a white fence around the narrow platform. “That must be in the attic.”

“The attic!” Chan smacks his hands together like this is some kind of amazing revelation, cheeks flushing red with the cold. “I totally forgot about that. Have you managed to get in there yet?”

Mingyu hasn’t, but he also has kind of been avoiding trying to. “Not yet. I don’t know where the key would be. The only other way to get in would be just breaking the door off, and I don’t really want to do that.”

“Minghao would know,” Yebin says to Chan, low like she didn’t necessarily want Mingyu to hear.

He does, though, so he turns to look at her and chimes in. “He said that he’d been in there before. Do you think he would really know where the key is?”

Yebin and Chan exchange a look, and then Yebin looks back at him. “Maybe. It’s not a certainty,” she continues, tugging on the edge of the knit beanie she has pulled down over her blonde hair. “But maybe.”

“He definitely spent more time in this house than any one of us,” Chan says, then gives Mingyu an apologetic look. “Except you, now, maybe. Welcome to town, everything is weird and none of our things are nice.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Either way,” Yebin says, looking back up at the window. “Your best bet might be getting into the attic somehow and bringing a ladder up to that balcony. We could use something normal-sized, then, and not try to rob the fire station for their ladder.”

“You always shoot down my grand larceny plans,” Chan whines, pouting at Yebin cheesily. “It’s almost like you’re trying to tell me it’s _wrong_.”

They retreat inside pretty quickly after that, the wind picking enough to rattle the last of the leaves off of the trees. Mingyu makes coffee and Yebin dumps her stuff in the back entrance into the kitchen before wandering off to inspect one of the light switches in the dining room which has recently started making weird hissing noises.

Chan throws himself clumsily into one of the wooden chairs at the kitchen table and accepts coffee once it’s ready. “It’s crazy,” he says, clutching the mug tight, “How much you’ve fixed up the house.”

Mingyu shrugs awkwardly and leans against the counter. “Thanks, um. It still feels like there’s a ways to go.”

“Yeah, but you have, like, electricity and running water. That’s a pretty amazing milestone.”

Mingyu snorts. “And heat, soon. Hopefully.”

“Right. To heat,” Chan says, cheersing with the coffee before sipping it and promptly sputtering from the burn. After he recovers, which takes some minutes and Mingyu plying him with cookies, he drums his fingers on the table and leans back in the chair. “How do you think we could get into the attic, if we don’t have Minghao to help?”

“Dunno,” Chan says, rocking back enough for the two front legs of the chair to leave the ground. “It’s locked, right?”

“Pretty well, yeah.”

“Then there’s gotta be a key.” He frowns and casts a glance around the room as if he’ll just find it sitting on one of the counters. “You haven’t found anything like that as you’ve been digging through all the junk in here?”

“Yeah, I totally found a mysterious key but it just didn’t seem relevant until now.” Mingyu sighs and glances out the window at the backyard. The wind has picked up, making the leaves swirl in almost-cyclones on the ground. “I can keep looking around, I guess.”

The days keep passing. Mingyu tags along with Chan more to other places in town, more out of a kind of curiosity than boredom. The house is still by far the most interesting thing he has going on, or at least that he wants to focus on.

Chan’s friends are nice. Growing up in the same town with only a handful of other kids makes for a pretty mixed group upon adulthood. Most of them are around his age, give or take a few years, and they all had the same habit of touching on inside jokes or references from ages ago only to flit away from them to the next subject as easy as anything.

The first time he meets anyone out of his current social circle, which is admittedly very limited, Mingyu has a very brief panic attack on the sidewalk outside Chan’s building before going in.

It ends up being for nothing, which most of his panic attacks are. Yebin shouts him over and pulls him to sit next to her on the ratty couch, curling her arm around one of his protectively.

“This is Mingyu,” she says, digging her pointy chin into his shoulder briefly as she surveys the rest of them. “He’s very delicate, so don’t scare him. Also, he’s not possessed.”

“That we know of,” Chan interjects, perching on the arm of the couch on Mingyu’s other side.

Mingyu grins weakly and waves at the handful of others in the room. There’s no immediate shout of recognition, or even a hint of suspicion, so that settles his stomach a little.

Vernon is a kind of baby-faced kid who’s apparently still older than Chan by a little, with a tendency to wear jeans more ripped than not and bright snapbacks.

“His boyfriend got all the fashion sense in the relationship,” Chan says, shaking Vernon’s shoulders lightly before he gets tossed off.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Vernon argues, but he’s grinning crookedly and directs that easily enough over to Mingyu. “Nice to meet you, dude. It’s good to see someone back in that house, it’s been empty too long.”

“How is all that?” Another girl asks, leaning curiously over her knees. “I’ve never actually been inside.”

“What Kyulkyung wants to ask,” Yebin clarifies wryly, tilting her head towards Mingyu as if telling a secret, “Is whether there’s a bunch of, like, rubies just kind of lying around.”

“It’s a big house!” Kyulkyung sputters, waving her hands a little to indicate just how big the house is. “They have to have some kind of money.”

“Most of anything valuable probably got taken by old lady Wu’s family, don’t you think?” Chan says, scratching the side of his jaw. “I don’t see why they would just leave it sitting around in the house.”

“They left the house sitting around long enough,” Vernon says, shooting Yebin a strangely apologetic look as he shrugs. “Maybe they just didn’t want to go through any of it when she died.”

Yebin shifts. “That’s a hard thing to do,” she says. “Going through someone’s things after they’re gone. It’s easier to put everything away, maybe look at it later.”

The mood in the room has significantly dropped, and Mingyu watches Kyulkyung play with her fingers while everyone seems to bite back their words.

In the end, it’s Vernon who breaks the awkward silence, just shaking his head and scrubbing at the back of his hair with one hand. “You’ll have to have us over sometime, dude,” he says, grinning at Mingyu. “That way Kyulkyung can go on her treasure hunt.”

That makes Kyulkyung cackle and reach over to slap Vernon on the knee, which makes him throw a pillow at her, and before Mingyu can even realize it they’re just kind of hanging out.

It’s nice.

Back home - back in the city, which has started to feel long enough ago that it’s somehow separate from the concept of home now - it had never been this easy to meet people and have them sink familiar into your skin so quickly. Josh had been more the exception than the rule, and that had always been tinged with a soft sense of fascination, museum-like wonder.

This is warm, and easier than it maybe should be, and Mingyu settles back into the couch and lets Yebin cut off circulation in his hand as she squeezes his arm with hers.

Things like this, people like this, make Mingyu just a bit more likely to believe in the ability to cure a cold with nothing more than good intentions.

 

The problem with animals is this:

They see more than they let on, and say far less.

They act on all that more often than not, though, and you end up feeling like you’re chasing their tails.

They also tend to leave claw marks in the nice hardwood, but it’s more signature than vandalism.

And people are always the hardest to understand, no matter how much they talk.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the change in the number of parts, this whole thing has kind of ran away from me.
> 
> suggested listening for this part:
> 
> Dearly Departed | Shakey Graves  
> Melted | AKMU  
> Candle | All Our Exes Live in Texas  
> Hopeless Wanderer | Mumford & Sons  
> Little Talks | Of Monsters and Men
> 
> thanks for sticking with me, folks. part 3 will be out in hopefully about a week, just like this one.

The problem with aging is this:

What you gain in wisdom rarely makes up for the losses in adaptability.

Your decorating becomes outdated.

And the spaces you carved out for people remain even after they leave you.

 

The first snow is earlier than expected.

Mingyu goes to bed wrapped in about four different quilts because the house is drafty despite the newly-repaired furnace doing its best.

He wakes up to a kind of wet chill in the air, and a front yard barely covered in a scattered dusting of snowflakes.

Most of the trees around the house are different varieties of oaks and maples, which are completely bare and skeleton-looking by now, but the ones lining the gravel drive are pine. They stand tall and solid, gathering powdery flakes in their boughs, and it looks almost postcard-perfect in certain angles.

When he opens the front door to get a better look the squashed-face gray cat is waiting for him, and it gives him a look like he’s somehow late for an appointment that they never agreed on.

“You’ve gotta get an owner or something,” Mingyu says down to his feet as the cat brushes right past him and wanders into the house. “Because I am a very unwilling foster dad right now.”

The cat ignores him, of course. Mingyu supposes that if it started listening all of a sudden now it would be a bit of a shock.

He ends up shaking his head and closing the door again, and takes his morning coffee in the kitchen instead of on the porch.

“You’re what, seven years old? At _least_. I don’t really know much about cats and aging and that stuff,” he confesses, watching as the cat inspects the various corners of the kitchen floor before hopping up on the counter to lie down next to an empty vase he found in one of the closets. “You could be twenty for all I know.”

The cat yawns, showing sharp teeth, one broken at the end, and smacks its lips.

“What I’m saying is there’s no way you’ve lived outside your whole life. You’re the most domesticated cat I’ve ever seen.” Mingyu eyes it as it rolls over onto its side, showing off its fat stomach. “I should probably know right now whether you’re a girl or a boy, but hey, gender is a construct, right?”

The cat blinks at him and promptly goes to sleep.

“Great. Good to see my jokes are landing about as well as they usually do.”

He drinks his coffee slowly, thinking.

With the colder weather he’s mostly migrated to indoor work on the house. Some pretty intense deep cleaning, polishing, repainting in some areas and stripping wallpaper in others.

The house in general is liveable, overall, if you aren’t too picky with the definition of the term.

Which is why it’s bothering the fucking hell out of Mingyu that he can’t get to the entirety of the house.

“If you were a key,” he says, making the cat’s whiskers twitch but otherwise getting no outward sign that it’s listening to him, “Where would you hide?”

He waits for an answer, because he’s an idiot. “Like. I’ve already taken all the cushions off of the couches to clean them. What’s next, prying up floorboards?”

The cat’s tail, which is hanging off the edge of the counter limply, twitches.

Mingyu’s eyes look, almost automatically, at the back door leading from the kitchen to the yard.

“Oh, fuck, hold on.”

The snow has gotten heavier by the time Mingyu struggles into a pair of sweatpants because he doesn’t really have any good snow clothes, tucking the cuffs into his pair of waterproof work boots and pulling on his heavy parka.

The flakes are huge, maybe as big as his thumb in some places, and he can feel them collecting in his hair as he stomps out of the house and towards the last remaining bit of the garden shed.

“This is some actual treasure hunting shit,” he mutters under his breath, crowbar in one hand. “If I find, like, an X spray painted in red on the ground under the floor I’m actually going to go insane. Let Kyulkyung or Chan or whoever deal with this.”

He reaches the platform and abruptly feels a little stupid, standing over it and glaring down at the snow-covered wooden boards. There isn’t much accumulation, maybe a half-inch, and it’s all dry enough that it brushes aside easy as anything when he wipes at it with his hands.

That was maybe a bad idea, because now his hands are both cold and soaking wet. This is all going great so far.

Mingyu lifts up the crowbar to tap it thoughtfully on one of the boards, the sound echoing enough to indicate that it is the hollow, kind of raised platform that he guessed it was. The sort of thing to have a family of bunnies living under it, or, apparently, literal pirate treasure.

Feeling just a little like he’s completely lost it and is turning into the kind of frozen hermit that Josh seems so concerned he’s becoming, Mingyu starts to yank the boards up off the ground.

It’s slow-going. His hands are slippery, first of all, and it takes him a couple tries to get the right kind of leverage to even start tearing boards off of the nails. The wood is also thicker than what the deck was made out of, with more care put into construction.

He makes progress, though, taking a break at one point to go put on scarf and a pair of garden gloves on because they’re the best thing he’s got at the moment.

It goes more quickly after that, and soon enough he’s worked up a sweat under his coat and he has a pile of planks lying on the ground next to the half-empty square frame of the platform.

Finally, Mingyu sits heavily on the one side of the platform that he left intact, dropping the crowbar near the pile of planks as he goes.

The ground underneath the platform is dry, crumbly dirt, with some small tufts of long-dead grass and loose gravel. He kicks it around with the toe of one boot and abruptly feels really, really stupid.

Then, it’s like the universe heard him thinking that and decided to make him feel even stupider.

“Wow.” Mingyu starts when the voice speaks up behind him, spine shooting straight, but he almost doesn’t even want to turn and look. “Did you take a vacation or something? I figured this would be gone within a few days, not months.”

Mingyu blinks down at a particularly lumpy bit of rock before finally chancing a look over to the side, back towards the house.

Minghao is wearing a snow-dusted black peacoat that looks too thin and fashionable to actually be warm. His hands are shoved in the pockets and he’s got these shiny black boots on, the heels just raised enough to keep him out of the snow.

His hair is black now, too, and his nose and ears are red.

Mingyu’s stomach feels like a bird, swooping down from a power wire only to bank back upward just in time to clear the tree line.

“Uh - I was doing other things.” He watches, frozen as Minghao takes a few steps closer as if to hear him better. The only sound out here is the soft crunch of Minghao’s boots in the snow, the low whistle of the wind through the bare branches, and Mingyu’s voice. “You’re back.”

Minghao’s nose goes a bit redder at that, and he cuts his eyes down to look at the ground. “I’m back.”

The silence stretches like taffy between them. Minghao’s the one to break it - Mingyu’s too busy trying to catalogue all of the tiny but somehow huge changes to Minghao.

He has pierced ears. Did he have pierced ears before?

“You’re probably going to get sick,” Minghao says, and his breath puffs out in front of him in little clouds. He’s still not really looking at Mingyu. “I didn’t come back just to nurse you back to health.”

Mingyu blinks, a snowflake landing in his eye and making him wipe the moisture away with the back of his hand. “I’ll be okay. Um. You’re done with work?”

“For now.” Minghao glances at him and shrugs minutely. Mingyu can’t tell if it’s the fabric of the coat or if his posture is actually that tense. “You’re done with the shed for real, now, then.”

Mingyu taps his fingers against the remaining few floorboards. “I, uh, was kind of looking for something.”

Minghao’s head tilts almost imperceptibly to the side. “Looking for something?” He’s wearing a long silvery earring that brushes just barely along a stretched tendon in his neck. Mingyu, abruptly, wants to bite it.

He’s fucked, apparently, is the thing.

“Sort of. Not really,” Mingyu quickly follows it up with. “It was a dumb idea.”

When he looks back up Minghao is close enough that he could reach out and touch the square outline of where the platform was. If he wanted to.“What were you looking for?”

Mingyu avoids his eyes this time and just gestures back to the house with his chin. “The chimney is boarded up on top,” he says, jumping topics because it’s not like he really owes Minghao any good explanation. “We need to get to the roof to clear it out. I’m really not wanting to, like, rent a fire truck ladder, or anything, so.”

Minghao just looks at him, eyebrows furrowed, a tiny wrinkle forming between them. “So.”

“So,” Mingyu says, dragging the syllable out and spreading his hands wide at the bare dirt below him. “I need to get into the attic.”

Minghao goes tense again at that, and the wrinkle gets deeper. “The attic.”

“Yebin says that we could probably get up to the roof pretty easily from the attic, if we could actually get into it.”

“Which of course is why you’re tearing up the floor of the shed.”

“Obviously.” Mingyu snorts at how Minghao’s face goes all twisty and confused at that. “I told you, it’s dumb. I just kind of thought hey, you know where I haven’t looked for a key yet? Under some fuckin’ wooden planks out in the backyard.”

Minghao twitches, maybe at the curse but maybe at something else. “You’re trying to find the key to the attic.”

“Yeah, that’s the short of it, I guess.” Mingyu braces his hands against the remaining section of floor so he can haul himself up to stand.

Minghao follows the movement closely, and for a second Mingyu thinks about the twitchy way that some of the cats, the more rangey ones with scars and nicked ears, watch him move through the house. “Have you found it yet?”

And that… that’s not really the reaction he was expecting “Haven’t really looked too hard, honestly.”

Minghao watches silently as Mingyu kicks some dirt and rocks around half-heartedly.

The sky is a pale, washed-out grey above them. It’s only late November. It shouldn’t feel this bleak.

Then, Mingyu’s boot hits something that rings out with a dull, metallic _ping_.

Mingyu freezes, and Minghao’s spine goes straight and tense again. They both look down at the ground in almost the same exact motion.

Buried in the dirt, hidden under a scattering of gravel, just barely high enough off the ground that the lid of it clears the base layer of dirt, is the round top of a rusty, battered coffee tin.

Mingyu blinks down at it, wipes the moisture of a snowflake from his cheekbone, and lets out a visible sigh.

Digging it out of the dirt isn’t as hard as it should be. The ground isn’t really frozen yet, and the dirt is only loosely packed against the side of the can. Mingyu’s able to scrabble at the lid a few times until he can get a good grip on the edge of it and just wiggle it free.

Minghao kicks the loose gravel into the hole that it leaves behind, and then sits heavily down on the remaining floorboards next to Mingyu. His arm is a few inches away from Mingyu’s and when he pulls his hands out of his pockets finally his fingers are pale and his knuckles are rosy red.

“Let me see that.”

“Can I just try it first?” Mingyu finds himself clutching the tin protectively to his chest, which is all kinds of ridiculous. “Don’t tell me you’re buying into Chan’s whole conspiracy with these things.”

Minghao’s eyebrows go low and flat and he gives Mingyu a disbelieving stare. “Conspiracy?”

Mingyu sniffs, nose starting to run from the cold. “He said something about land mines,” he mutters under his breath, reluctantly enjoying the way Minghao snorts at that, and digs his fingers in under the edge of the lid to the tin.

He almost falls over backwards when the lid pops cleanly off of the can. He manages to save himself at the last second, though, so he has _some_ grace left, maybe.

Minghao’s eyes are are sharp and focused, watching Mingyu peer into the can. “What is it?” he asks, fingers curling around his knees. They look bony in the thin jeans that he’s wearing under his coat, and Mingyu suppresses the definitely idiotic instinct to take him inside and bundle him up in some blankets and make him tea.

“I don’t know yet, give me a second.” Mingyu sets the lid down and, taking a breath in, peers down into the tin.

On top is a pair of soft, dark red knit mittens. Mingyu removes them first, passing them over to Minghao before he can think about it.

Minghao takes them, holding them like a bird cupped between his hands, uncertain and worried.

Underneath is a small pile of soft, worn paper scraps. They rustle in the wind that blows by as they sit there, staring down into the tin.

Mingyu digs past them, leaving the paper where it is because all he can think about it how Minghao will want to neatly organize them in incomprehensible piles at some point, and looks for anything else underneath them all.

He finds it quickly.

The breath that Minghao takes in is shaky, unsure, as Mingyu pulls out a thin scrap of string with a rusted washer tied to the end of it from the can. Clinking against the washer is a dully glinting bronze key, small and entirely plain looking.

Minghao’s hand goes to his left wrist before he seems to have time to think about it. It’s bare, as far as Mingyu can tell, but Minghao seems shaken all the same.

“That - that shouldn’t be there,” Minghao says, the words appearing cumulonimbus in the winter air. “How is that there?”

Mingyu holds the tin between his knees so he can take both ends of the string in each hand, holding them taught to leave the washer and the key hanging down in the exact middle. “D’you think I should try it?”

Minghao’s jaw is tight when Mingyu glances over at him, but he only takes a moment to stare curiously at Mingyu before swallowing and nodding.

Mingyu shakes off his boots when he slips through the back door leading into the kitchen, pausing just long enough to hold the door open for Minghao.

He doesn’t think about it, before he does it, but after Minghao ducks through behind him and toes his own shoes off onto the rug near the door Mingyu abruptly feels young, clumsy, and like his pulse is going to beat out of his skin.

He lets the door close, and Minghao shivers one last time. “It’s warm in here,” he says, like it’s a revelation.

“The furnace is fixed,” Mingyu says back, and dumps his parka onto one of the kitchen chairs. It feels like a claim of space, a statement that ‘hey look, this is mine now, and I can do this. I can leave my shit on the chairs. It’s mine.’

Minghao takes his coat off but just folds it over one arm and carries it with him. He follows close on his heels up the stairs and down the hall to the hatch that leads up to the attic, supposedly.

Minghao does take a second to peek into the second bedroom and make a surprised noise. “You aren’t sleeping up here,” he says, more an observation than a question.

Mingyu frowns, stretching up so he can reach the little trap door in the ceiling. “No,” he grunts out, on his toes just so he can wiggle the key into the small lock on the one side of the square door. “Feels weird, you know. It’s doesn’t actually feel like my house, sort of.”

Minghao withdraws from the doorway of the bedroom but still keeps his distance, looking like a shadow against the pale white paint of the hallway. “You bought it. It’s yours.”

Mingyu finally fits the key into the lock and lets out a breath. “Technically, yeah, but - I mean. A family lived in here for _decades_ before I bought it. At what point is it actually mine?”

Minghao doesn’t answer, just watches as Mingyu stretches back up and turns the key.

It resists at first, and Mingyu has a moment of panic and dumb despair, before something clicks and the key rotates in the lock.

The door hinges squeak, and then the hatch drops open in a puff of stale air and dust.

Mingyu almost gets brained on the skull by the door dropping, and Minghao actually lets out a hysterical-sounding cackle at it. “If this house actually kills you,” he says, rubbing his eyes with one hand while his mouth twitches, “I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Why, ‘cuz my ghost will haunt you forever?” Mingyu looks around, and then goes to grab the desk chair from the nearby office. “D’you want a boost?”

Minghao gives him a look that, in Mingyu’s opinion, is totally undeserved. “How about you go up first,” he says, finally placing his outer coat down on the carpet runner that lines the center of the hallway. “I’ll follow once I’m sure that you didn’t get attacked by bats or something.”

He’s wearing a soft-looking pale blue sweater over his jeans. Mingyu wants to touch it, and also wants to die a little.

“Okay, fine, I’ll be the guinea pig.” He hoists himself up onto the chair, which thankfully holds his weight. He honestly wasn’t too sure about that part of the equation for a moment. “If I don’t come back in five minutes call animal control.”

The last thing he hears before he successfully hooks his elbows onto the edge of the square hatch, head sticking up into the darkness through the door, is Minghao’s muffled snort of laughter.

The attic is thick with dust, and Mingyu has to kind of wiggle his feet before his old gym habits kick in and he’s able to heave himself up through the hatch and into the room above.

It’s not completely dark, thanks to the window that Mingyu already knows looks out over the back yard, but it’s golden-brown and hazy all the same.

He gets his knees under himself and scrambles away from the door, just in case. He doesn’t completely trust himself not to fall back down, and also holy _fuck_ , there’s actually stuff in this room.

The space is small but more in a cozy way than a cramped one. Mingyu crawls to the window to yank the twin curtains away from the glass, letting in the light, and it pools like cool white water against the angles of the furniture in the room.

The room is maybe tall enough for Mingyu to stand up and not hit his head, but not by much. There’s a mattress pushed into one corner with a soft-looking, if dusty, dark red comforter still tucked in neatly on it. A small lamp stands next to it, with a circle lamp shade that he can see the outline of a moth through.

Mingyu absently passes his hand over the rug that covers most of the room, or at least the side that he ended up on. It’s soft, and just thick enough that his fingertips can dig into it a bit.

The ceiling slopes up, so that the space where the mattress sits is the lowest at maybe four feet, while the other end of the room hits about six feet. There’s a shelf on that side, a low wooden thing, cluttered like the ones in the garden shed but somehow more personal.

Mingyu shifts on his knees to get closer. It’s mostly candles, and a few folded sweaters, and an old picture frame. It’s empty, and he can see the back of the shelf through the clear glass in the middle of the frame.

“I’m not in shape enough for this,” Minghao mutters from behind him, voice close enough that he must have managed to wriggle his way up into the crawl space. “God, it’s dusty in here.”

“Why did this room not get cleared out?” Mingyu asks instead of really responding. “Look at all this shit. Do you think they lost the key too?”

He turns to watch Minghao curl his legs to the side, away from the open trapdoor set in the floor of the attic. “I mean,” Minghao says, pushing his hair back from his face with one hand as he eyes the room around them. “Unless they had another copy of that thing, then, looks like it.” His voice is thin with sarcasm, but something about the wide set of his eyes makes him seem startled.

“Right.” Mingyu turns away again and pokes at the rest of the clutter on the shelves. There are maybe a dozen candles, all in various states of melted, and he carefully moves them all to the same shelf.

It’s really not that dusty in here, he thinks absently, eyeing the circle of clean wood that moving the candles reveals. The rest of the house had been way worse.

The sweaters are neatly arranged on the lowest shelf, and he ignores them in favor or peering at the rest of the odds and ends scattered about. A small dish has several rings lying in the bottom of it, silver and bronze and shining lowly from the light coming from outside, as well as the bedside lamp that miraculously works when Minghao switches it on.

There are seashells, and bits of dried flowers, and stacks of paperback books with the covers almost entirely peeled off of the binding.

The whole room seems almost unbearably private, locked away from the world completely - until now, that is, and Mingyu’s stomach goes guilty and a little sick at that.

Suddenly there’s a rush of cold air, along with a sticky creaking noise as Minghao pushes the window open. “That balcony is kind of just for show, you know,” he says as he secures it, and Mingyu can see goosebumps prickle up on the bare skin of his arms where his sleeves are pushed up to his elbows. “I’m not really sure if it’ll hold your weight.”

Mingyu crawls over next to Minghao, still not really wanting to chance standing up in here, and peers out the window.

The balcony does look like one of those decorative ones, with a neatly painted white fence around it and about four inches of snow accumulated on the ground. “Maybe I should just start tossing some stuff out there, see if it collapses.”

Minghao makes a muffled snort and moves to close the window again. “Sounds like a plan for a day with better weather,” he says, pulling it so it shuts tightly and so he can flip the little latch that locks it. “I can see why you might want the fireplace to work on days like this, though.”

“It would be a little nice, just a bit.”

“Missing your nice, heated city apartments now, I’m sure.”

“Like you can talk, I’m sure up until you got back whenever ago you were staying somewhere with working heating too.” Mingyu regrets the sentence almost as soon as he says it, because Minghao retreats almost imperceptibly away from him, leaving a cool spot where he was. “I mean - um.”

“No, you’re right.” Minghao pushes his hair out of his eyes again and shoots Mingyu a grin that seems watered-down. “Company lodging is always prime, huh?”

“I - I just meant, you were gone for awhile, Chan said you’re usually going between different cities for clients, I wasn’t…” Mingyu trails off. He’s not sure how things already got away from him so quickly.

Minghao shakes his head and scoots away from Mingyu to head back to the open door back down into the hallway. “Can I use your kettle?” he asks, leaving Mingyu to look at the back of his neck and wonder how he didn’t notice how close they were until the sudden spot of warmth on his arm was gone. “I think I need tea.”

“Sure,” Mingyu says, and the word hangs in the air, uneasy.

Minghao shoots him a strange smile over his shoulder before swinging his feet through the doorframe and then hopping down into the hallway underneath. He does it before Mingyu pulls together the presence of mind to ask if he needs help, and his feet make a low thud when he lands but there’s no indication that he’s, like, broken his leg, or anything, so it must be alright.

Mingyu pokes around the room. It’s a little bit of a desperate attempt to buy himself some time before he has to go back downstairs and try to talk to Minghao again, as if everything is totally normal and he didn’t just drop off the map for, like, three months, but whatever. Mingyu’s pride at this point is pretty minimal.

The search doesn’t turn up anything that makes the house make more sense to him. There’s an empty cardboard box, about the size of a shoe box, pushed into one corner that Mingyu peers into before putting it gingerly back. Everything else is more of the same kind of thing as the shelf at the one end of the room - bits of string and paper and more soft to the touch books, the room only barely lived-in but incomprehensibly personal at the same time.

Eventually the moth on the inside of the lampshade flutters and almost flies right into Mingyu’s face when he brushes against the lamp, and he takes that as his cue to beat a hasty retreat back to the kitchen.

When he gets back downstairs Minghao has gone strange and quiet, tea sitting and steaming near his elbow as he looks over a flat pad of note paper lying on the kitchen table. He flips it every now and then, making concerned noises, and Mingyu can keenly feel how fragile the silence is.

Mingyu, for his part, thinks he does a really good job of Not Freaking Out and keeping busy. The soup he makes that night takes six hours to finish, and Mingyu is able to spend most of that time alternating between hovering over the stove and furiously cleaning the kitchen.

Everything finishes late enough at night that it’s dark outside when Mingyu ladles himself a bowl of the soup. He leaves the rest of it in the pot, the burners barely turned on to keep everything warm, but he leaves a matching bowl next to them.

Minghao’s waist underneath his sweater seems worryingly narrow as he curves over the notepad on the table, and the same when he stands up and stretches and a thin slip of pale skin shows just over the belt loops of his jeans.

Mingyu eats at the dining room table and Minghao eats standing up, looking out the window over the sink at the almost-torn apart floor of the shed.

Minghao does the dishes. It shouldn’t warm the base of Mingyu’s stomach as much as it does.

“You’re still sleeping down here, then?” Minghao eventually asks, breaching the silence between them like he’s stepping into a puddle without knowing how deep it actually is.

They’re both standing just on the threshold of the dining room, looking over Mingyu’s suddenly sad-looking air mattress.

Mingyu refuses to feel guilty about the quilts that pile over the mattress in a messy pile, and just tips his chin up an inch. “Yeah.”

Minghao folds his arms over his stomach and pokes the edge of the mattress with his toes. He’s wearing thick wool socks, which is surprising. Mingyu hasn’t ever really seen him in anything but expensive-looking brand name t-shirts and well-made jeans.

The socks are rough and grey and large-knit. They seem warm.

The mattress makes a sad deflating sound when Minghao nudges it, and he shoots Mingyu a look. “You’re going to just completely throw out your back if you keep sleeping on this thing,” he says.

“Hasn’t happened yet,” Mingyu shoots back, even though he knows he sounds like a six year old refusing to lose and argument. “I’m not _that_ old.”

“Still.” Minghao shifts, gripping his elbows with the opposite hand, and the look he’s giving Mingyu steadies. “You should move things upstairs this weekend.”

Mingyu automatically does the mental math. The days tend to blend together here, in this house, without the predictable schedule of work to help organize everything, but it’s definitely Friday. “You’re staying?” He says, without really thinking.

Minghao goes still, but it doesn’t take too long for him to respond. “I don’t have to.”

Outside the wind howls, eerie and shaking the window shutters, which Mingyu hasn’t had the heart to fully shut yet. He likes to watch the snow fall too much to do that. “You can. If you want to.”

Later, with the clock ticking closer to morning than evening, Minghao takes half of the quilts from the air mattress and molds himself a nest on the couch in the sitting room.

Mingyu tried to offer him the air mattress for a total of maybe ten seconds before Minghao had just scooped up the blankets and turned heel to the other room.

“I’m pretty sure the couch still has more structural integrity than the thing you’re sleeping on,” he tosses over his shoulder like he’s scattering breadcrumbs. Mingyu follows him, of course. “I’m fine with the couch.”

“If you’re sure.” Mingyu hovers, watching Minghao lie out the blankets before sitting down on the couch to rifle through a navy blue backpack that has appeared seemingly out of nowhere. “Um. I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

Minghao pulls a pair of soft-looking grey sweatpants out of the backpack and sits them on his lap before looking up at Mingyu. His hair doesn’t look as striking and dark as it did when he first appeared in the backyard - it’s more messy than sharp, now.

He has dark circles under his eyes. Mingyu hadn’t noticed them before.

“Have a good night,” Minghao finally says, eyes dropping to fiddle with the waistband of the folded sweatpants.

That night the wind is louder than anything Mingyu has heard before. It seems to shake the very skeleton of the house, making the frame of it creak and moan in complaint.

Mingyu reads a news article that Josh linked him to on his phone, screen glowing blue-white against his face as he curls up on his side.

After a few minutes of skimming it for familiar names, he turns the phone off and tosses it away, rolling over onto his other side. His mind spins a bit with the jargon, the numbers, the anonymous but pointed accusations and testimonials.

For a second, he imagines that he can hear the sound of Minghao’s breathing from the other room, slow with sleep and quiet even above the whipping of the wind.

He feels, above all else, strangely trapped.

 

Mingyu should have known this was a bad idea. The next morning he rapidly has to deal with not only Minghao sitting curled up on the side of the kitchen table in those grey sweatpants and a huge t-shirt, this one soft cheap cotton, but then the fact that the fat grey cat has found its way into the house again.

“Did he let you in?” Mingyu asks the cat, having just stumbled into the kitchen. He’s still blinking sleep out of his eyes, and feels vaguely like he might be dreaming.

“He was in here before I woke up,” Minghao defends himself, but he shoots a surprisingly-soft smile at the cat. “I don’t think he was outside, he’s too dry for that.”

The cat lets out a very superior-sounding ‘mrow’ noise and rolls onto its side from where it’s lying smack in the middle of the table.

“‘Must have just stayed in after he snuck his way inside yesterday,” Mingyu says, almost missing the sharp way Minghao glances at him after. “Did you sleep alright?” He asks anyways, even if the words ring awkwardly familiar, all things considered.

Minghao rests his chin in the palm of one hand, elbow perched on the wooden table as he watches Mingyu plug the coffee machine in and bang around getting clean cups out. “Alright,” he says. “Do you let cats into the house often?”

Mingyu snorts and spoons coffee grounds into a filter. “The fact that you think I let them in is charitable. They just kind of drop by every now and again, I think they realize that I’m too nice for my own good.”

“That’s not exactly how I’ve gotten to know you.” Minghao’s smirking when Mingyu shoots him a look for that, though, and he does look amazingly soft and comfortable, sitting right there. “I’m not surprised, though. The cats tend to do whatever they want.”

Mingyu listens to the coffee pot make horrible gurgling noises and watches Minghao pet the cat’s side with a careful, but familiar hand. “You have experience, then.”

“Sort of.” Minghao smiles differently, warmer, at the cat. “They keep an eye out for me.”

“They?” Mingyu leaves two mugs, one with a chipped handle and one with no handle at all, near the warming pot and moves on to making breakfast. “You’ve seen the others too, then?”

“Of course. You mean you have?”

“I mean, some of them. However many there are in total, I mean.” Mingyu takes eggs and milk out of the fridge before leaning back against it and counting with his fingers. “That one, the black one, the striped one, the other striped one, the white one - I’m sure I’m missing some, but I’ve seen maybe six around? Did they used to belong to the woman who lived here, or something?”

Minghao hums, stroking down the side of the cat’s stomach and watching Mingyu wander around the kitchen. “Sort of. They never really belong to anyone, I don’t think. They just like to watch out for people.” The cat makes a rusty purr, and Minghao seems surprised into laughing a little at it. “They will eat you out of house and home if you let them, though.”

“Oh, I’ve figured that out easily enough.”

The coffee maker is slow but eventually Mingyu is able to pour himself some. He takes the mug without the handle, and leaves the other one sitting on the counter.

If Minghao wants some, he thinks, he can get it himself.

Considering the fact that he’s definitely making breakfast for two, the thought seems unnecessarily harsh.

Still, Minghao does eventually get up, spine cracking as he stretches and putting Mingyu vaguely in the mind of worrying. He pads over and pours coffee and then stands there, hip cocked against the counter, and watches Mingyu cook with his nose almost buried in the mug, steam wafting up over his eyes.

“The snow was crazy last night,” Minghao finally offers up. “It was probably good that he was inside, for all of that.”

Mingyu glances over, confused, before connecting the dots and looking over at the cat. “How much did it snow?”

“It seemed like close to a foot when I woke up.”

Mingyu whistles lowly. “No going anywhere today either, then.”

Minghao’s quiet as Mingyu works on breakfast, for long enough that Mingyu wonders if something’s wrong, but then he sighs just barely into his coffee. “I was thinking the same thing,” he admits, and shakes his hair into his eyes a little. “Would it be weird if I asked to borrow clothes?”

Mingyu freezes and looks at him, then back in the direction of the sitting room where the mostly-empty backpack he’d seen Minghao with last night probably still sits. “Oh, shit. Yeah, um, no problem. I’ll get you some stuff later.”

Later finds Minghao pulling on one of Mingyu’s sweatshirts over a pair of jeans, with his own socks that he’d pulled out of the bottom of the backpack with a triumphant noise.

The clothes don’t fit too poorly; they’re almost the same size except for the slightly more narrow cast of Minghao’s body and the few inches Mingyu has on him, so he looks perfectly presentable to just be standing around in a house.

Still, though, Mingyu spends a good twenty minutes trying not to hear Joshua’s voice in the back of his mind being completely ridiculous about it all.

“Okay,” Minghao says, dusting off his hands and breaking through the fog of Mingyu’s thoughts. “I’m going to start moving you upstairs. If you want to help you’re more than welcome to,” he continues, already moving to fiddle with the air mattress to deflate it, “but this is ridiculous, you can’t keep sleeping on the floor.”

Mingyu sputters, watching Minghao neatly dismantle the entire bed situation. “We threw the mattress out,” he says desperately, hands hovering as Minghao balls the quilts and sheets up and dumps them in the corner. “I’ll still need to use that air mattress.”

“For now.” Minghao flops down on the sinking mattress, which lets out a wheeze of air. “When the plows make their way down here we can go get a new one.”

Mingyu shakes his head, ignoring that casual ‘we’ that he’s not even sure Minghao noticed he said, and nervously picks up the bundle of blankets that Minghao just threw. “I don’t get it. You’re a lot more concerned for my well-being now. Miss me that much?”

“Don’t go getting a big head,” Minghao scolds, finally getting the mattress mostly flat so he can roll it up. “It’s a stupid enough idea, trying to live in this house. You don’t make it any easier self-sabotaging the way you seem to want to do.”

Mingyu blinks, and Minghao takes advantage of the silence to shove the rolled-up mattress in his arms too. “The house really isn’t that bad, anymore,” he says when he can’t think of anything better. “Kind of cold, yeah, and there’s still work to do with, I don’t know, decorating, but it’s way better than it was.”

Minghao actually rolls his eyes and starts gathering the couple of loose pillows that Mingyu has scavenged from various stores around town. “You’ve tamed it,” he says finally, and breezes by Mingyu to head up the stairs. “We’ll see if that lasts.”

Minghao sets the mattress, reinflated upstairs, into the frame in the master bedroom. It looks a little dumb, smaller than the probably king size bed frame, but after he fills in the gaps with blankets and quilts and pillows it looks a little better.

He directs Mingyu to bring all his stuff upstairs and start “actually unpacking”, as Minghao calls it, filling about three of the five dresser drawers and leaving a scattering of things on the bathroom sink.

“There,” Minghao says, messing with Mingyu’s toothpaste until it’s the perfect angle against the marble, or whatever. “Now it looks more like someone actually lives here, not just like there’s a hobo squatting in the first floor.”

“Hey,” Mingyu protests. “At least I took everything out of my suitcases.” Mostly, he adds internally, but Minghao doesn’t have to know about _all_ of his issues.

“You’re the one who said you planned on living here.” Minghao has moved on to unfolding some towels and giving them a violent snap before hanging them on the towel racks by the bath. “If you’re so committed to that you might as well sleep in an actual bed, you animal.”

Mingyu can’t help but shake his head and laugh and stand back as Minghao, like a man possessed, sets to making the master bedroom look ‘lived in’. The whole process mostly consists of mussing blankets the perfect amount, which is perfectly imperceptible to Mingyu, and reorganizing the couple of things he has hanging in the closet until Minghao is satisfied.

At one point the grey cat comes wandering upstairs to find them, and Minghao gives the bed a couple pats before the cat finally jumps and curls up in the nest of quilts.

Mingyu watches from a slight distance, putting up with just a few pointed looks Minghao shoots him until he moves to help.

Eventually Minghao seems momentarily satisfied, because he moves on to the office.

“You didn’t bring a ton of things, did you?” He asks at one point, running a finger through the dust on the empty bookshelf as Mingyu tries to get the electric outlet under the desk to work. “Is everything else in storage?”

“Sort of,” Mingyu grumbles, because it’s easier than trying to explain away the fact that he’s technically still paying rent on his apartment right now, too. “Can you pass me the cord?”

Minghao slides the computer charger under the desk to him and continues. “There’s no internet in here, you know, unless you’ve really been doing some upgrades.”

Mingyu wiggles out from under the desk so he can plug his laptop into the charger, making a proud noise when the little red light goes on to show it’s charging. “That’s totally fine with me,” he says.

The computer will take a while to charge. He doesn’t think he’s touched it since back in July. His phone’s been enough, for all that he’s actually used it.

“If you say so,” Minghao mutters, flipping his own cell phone in his hands now. “What are you going to do with the other bedroom?”

That takes Mingyu aback a little, because he honestly hadn’t thought about it much. “Dunno. Leave it empty for now, I guess.”

Minghao sniffs and walks out of the office, leaving Mingyu to scamper on his heels to follow him to the second bedroom. “You really didn’t have a lot planned after the whole cleaning process, huh?”

Mingyu leans on the doorframe, watches Minghao touch the bedframe and the rickety nightstand with careful fingers. “I was thinking about painting,” he finally replies.

Minghao lets out a shocked snort at that, and he turns enough to give Mingyu a startled-amused look. “Why does that sound like an awful idea, you and paintbrushes?”

“You know, you’re mean for someone I’m not really that good friends with,” Mingyu says, although he knows that his smile is showing through the tone of his voice. “Just barging in here, making me make you soup and give you clothes, only to get this treatment. How dare you.”

“I’m a delight,” Minghao replies, distracted again by the couple of thick-trunked candles that Mingyu’s moved up to the small dresser in here, upstairs from where he found them above the fireplace. “Do you have a lighter?”

“Uh. Downstairs, in the kitchen. Sometimes the pilot light in the stove doesn’t work,” Mingyu feels like he has to explain, for some reason.

“Okay.” Minghao nods, pleased, and shoves his hands in the pocket of Mingyu’s sweatshirt before brushing past him to head downstairs.

The day passes easier than Mingyu thought it would.

Minghao digs the lighter out from the drawer in the kitchen and makes slow rounds of the house, leaving lit candles in each room and scatterings of dried-up and papery flower petals across seemingly-random flat surfaces.

Mingyu follows him for the first twenty minutes or so of that whole process before realizing that Minghao really doesn’t give a shit whether he’s there or not. It makes more sense to split off, then, and Mingyu goes to cleaning and reorganizing the china in the dining room cabinet with single-minded focus.

They break for lunch in what is quickly becoming somewhat of a tradition. Mingyu doesn’t think about that fact too hard, and instead reheats some of the soup from the night before and keeps it on the stove next to a plate of sandwiches.

He eats before Minghao, because he can still hear him rattling around upstairs. Minghao appears as he’s washing dishes, though, slinking by Mingyu and picking at the crust of one of the sandwiches.

He has what looks like laundry lint in his hair, Mingyu notices, close enough that it’s easy enough to look down at the top of Minghao’s head, which is bent as he rummages through a drawer looking for a spoon. The back of his neck is pale over the dark green of Mingyu’s hoodie. His fingers are thin and quick, and he smells kind of like a mix of smoke and lemon thyme.

Mingyu pulls away to dry his dishes, and then takes some time to focus in very, very hard on laundry.

The snow is deeper than he thought, he notices at one point when he wanders through the entrance and pauses to glance out the front windows. It’s piled up in soft banks, and the sun is low enough at this point in the afternoon that everything is muted and pale outside.

“The plows probably finished the middle of town by now,” Minghao says, and Mingyu turns to see him perched on the staircase. “They’ll make their way out here tomorrow, hopefully, unless it keeps getting deeper overnight.”

Mingyu backs away from the window a step. “I’m kind of surprised that it’s this much snow. It still feels early, it’s barely even winter.”

Minghao shrugs and leans the side of his forehead against the banister. “We’re close to the mountains, so we get a decent amount of snow, usually. This is when the town really slows down.”

“I’m sure.”

The candles that Minghao has spread through the house, now lit, cast flickering shadows across the walls. Everything looks different - rooms that Mingyu would like to think he knows fairly well now are suddenly strange, dark and contrasting and moving with shapes that he doesn’t recognize.

Minghao follows him upstairs when Mingyu goes up to wash his face and get ready for bed.

He doesn’t say anything about it, really - neither of them do.

Minghao folds himself up on the floor, sideways against the wall so he can look out the back window to the yard, the half-skeleton of the shed floor. The silhouette of his face, the shape of his brow and the slant of his nose, the faint bump of his chin, is uncertain in the candlelight.

Mingyu thinks about turning on the overhead light in the bedroom to see better but doesn’t. He doesn’t really have a good excuse for it - the sun set awhile ago, and now the only light is from three fat candles that Minghao’s placed in a line on the dresser, all three made of the same white wax.

“Tomorrow,” Minghao says, voice echoing through the room to reach Mingyu when he retreats (runs) to the bathroom to scrub his face in the sink. “Tomorrow I might clear out the attic.”

Mingyu blinks water out of his eyes and glances over to him, even though he’s just a blur - Mingyu’s taken out his contacts by now. “If you want to. I kind of thought that was where you were getting all of these candles and stuff.”

There’s a brief pause, and the sound of shifting. “No,” Minghao finally says, “I brought most of this with me. Some of it’s from the house, from downstairs, but I haven’t touched any of the attic stuff yet.”

“Well,” Mingyu says, and dries his face with one of the towels that Minghao had hung up in the bathroom, “be my guest.”

Minghao’s still sitting there on the floor when Mingyu goes to sink into the bed, with its strangely-fitting mattress and the ridiculous amount of quilts that have been stuffed in to fill the empty sides of the frame. He doesn’t react when Mingyu sits down, just continues looking outside, so Mingyu fiddles with his phone for a little bit.

He has a text from Josh - something about how he hopes his furnace is working alright, and does he have enough of everything for being snowed in, and Mingyu wonders not for the first time if he’s set up some kind of weather alert using the zip code Mingyu gave him.

It makes him grin, just a bit, and shake his head down at the phone. He wouldn’t be surprised, is the thing.

Suddenly, there’s movement out of the corner of his eye, and Minghao is unfolding himself from his seated position to stand and stretch, the motion forcing an exhale from his lungs before he relaxes his posture and shoves his hands in the pocket of the sweatshirt he still has on.

“Well,” he says, looking down at his socks. “Gonna go put out the candles. Make sure you blow those out before you go to sleep,” and he nods towards the three on the dresser, “because a house fire wouldn’t really be the best thing to wake up to.”

Mingyu nods, feeling a little lost for no reason, and watches Minghao quickly leave the room. He listens to the dull thump of him heading down the stairs, and then to the far-away clatter of him moving around downstairs, in the kitchen, the dining room.

He waits for a few minutes, turning his phone over and over in his hands, before he gets up to blow out the candles.

Up here, the room suspended from the solid ground and stone foundation by what feels like only a few pieces of wood and a prayer, now pitch black except for the light shining in from the moon and its reflection in the snow, Mingyu feels strangely more alone than any night before.

 

The next morning, Mingyu wakes up to the vague notion that he’s being suffocated.

What a way to go. You survive almost six months in a haunted house before being murdered the first time you let someone else sleep in it with you.

He jerks awake and moves to sit up and the soft, heavy weight on his face tumbles off and onto his chest in a bundle of whiskers and claws.

“What the fuck,” he sputters, rubbing the back of his hand over his mouth to try to get all the cat hair out of it as the grey cat with his squashed face gets its feet back under it.

It gives him a deadly look and sits on the mattress just to the left of where Mingyu’s legs are, under the quilts.

Mingyu blinks at it and resists the urge to spit - he feels like he’s been chewing on a bunch of dusty grass. “What is this wake up call? Why me? Can’t you go bother Minghao, I’m sure he’d love to see you.”

Instead of replying in any distinct way - because of course it won’t, obviously, you’re really losing it Mingyu - the cat’s whiskers twitch at him in a way that seems to say ‘you’re on thin ice, buddy’.

Mingyu, briefly, wishes he had whiskers to twitch back.

Instead, he flops back down onto his back, head finding the divot that he’s punched down in the center of the pillow from sleeping on it. Outside, the morning light is a pale shade of grey.

He can hear muffled noises coming from above him. Minghao must already be at it, up in the attic.

When he finally drags himself out from under the warmth of the covers and downstairs the kitchen is quiet. There’s a beaten-up kettle sitting on the stove, one that Mingyu vaguely remembers finding in a cabinet ages ago but leaving alone just because of the sheer amount of rust on it. It looks almost spotless,  now, just dented.

He gives it a suspicious look and goes for the coffee machine instead.

The only other sign that Minghao’s awake is the neat pile of blankets sitting on the couch, his backpack still lying propped up on the side of the sofa. Mingyu eats a piece of toast, eyes the banks of snow outside, and thinks.

His and Minghao’s paths don’t cross until a few hours later, when Mingyu’s washed up and gotten dressed and is dead set on taking apart a severely retro microwave without somehow electrocuting himself.

Minghao pauses a bit when he walks into the kitchen and finds Mingyu there, sitting at the table surrounded by various bits of metal and plastic, like he forgot he was there. “Oh. Hey.”

Mingyu looks up and shoots him a half-grin. “Hey. Wow, that’s a lot of dust.”

Minghao actually flushes a little at that, ears and nose going pale pink as he brushes a hand through his hair, dislodging a puff of dust into the air. “I told you I was cleaning out the attic.”

“Right, just didn’t expect it to involve that much crawling around through, like, deserts.”

“You’re an asshole, aren’t you,” Minghao replies, tone exaggeratingly-shocked as he goes to the fridge to dig a water bottle out of the side door. “Is this what Chan and the rest of them have to deal with?”

“All the time. It’s a miracle they still hang out with me.” Mingyu eyes the sweater Minghao has on, pulled over that same pair of Mingyu’s jeans. The sweater isn’t his, he doesn’t recognize it - it’s a pale cream color with thick knit and a bit of a stretched neckline, but it fits him well. “Did you find more clothes?”

Minghao freezes for a split second, spine tight and arched like the cats when Mingyu catches them by surprise sometimes, but then he relaxes slowly, vertebrae by vertebrae. “In the attic,” he says, still facing into the fridge so all Mingyu can really see of his face is a bit of jawbone and then just the pale skin of the back of his neck. “Figured I’d put them to use, if they’re just gonna get thrown away otherwise.”

“You’re wearing, like, ghost sweaters?”

Minghao shoots him an offended look before closing the refrigerator door and leaning against it with a shoulder. “What the hell is a ghost sweater.”

“You know.” Mingyu gestures a little wildly with the battered screwdriver he’s holding. “Sweaters that belong to a ghost. Or, someone who’s probably a ghost, now.”

“I thought you didn’t buy all that ghost stuff.”

“I mean - I don’t, not really. Just, that stuff belonged to someone.” Mingyu drops the screwdriver so the tip pushes through one of the small piles of bolts that he’s taken out of the microwave and organized on the table top. “It feels kind of disrespectful to just take it.”

When he looks back up Minghao’s giving him one of his looks, the kind where he tips his chin down a degree to really focus in on him with those pale-blue eyes.

Distantly, Mingyu wonders about that. He didn’t think Minghao’s eyes were _that_ blue.

More greenish, really, or - weren’t they brown?

Minghao blinks, cutting the weird moment that had strung itself like a wire between them, and he turns the water bottle that he’d finally grabbed over in his hands. “I figure, at least it’s getting used like this,” he says, twisting the cap of the bottle until it cracks open. “Rather than collecting dust.”

Mingyu watches the slim line of Minghao’s neck as he drinks for just a second longer than he maybe should have and then goes back to the microwave - it’s a much, much safer subject of attention, right now.

 

It’s almost as if the second Mingyu really let himself notice Minghao - the effortlessly graceful way he moves through the house, the sense of compact power in his muscles, the angles of his face and curve of the back of his legs - it just sparks everything else off.

It’s absolutely nothing like it had been with Josh, back then, which makes it maybe worse.

With Josh it had been kind of starry-eyed fascination, the sense of protectiveness you get when someone gives you all their attention and love and you, barely out of your teens, go head over heels for them.

Mingyu had wanted to kiss Josh, obviously - he still wants to kiss Josh, in that distant way that he’s pretty sure _everyone_ wants to kiss Josh - but it was nothing like how his stomach ties itself in knots every time Minghao gets within a few feet of him in the kitchen.

The snow plows finally make their way down the road to Mingyu’s place the next day, the day after Minghao clears out the attic except for a pile of soft, if dusty, sweaters and some of the books. They only do the main road, obviously, leaving the driveway still covered.

“It’ll melt soon,” Minghao says, perched on the kitchen counter and watching Mingyu make dinner in a distant way. “It’s going to warm up a lot tomorrow.”

Mingyu very studiously does not look up from the pork chops he’s working on, although he can feel Minghao’s eyes on the side of his face. “That’s good. You, uh, won’t be stuck here, then.”

He can see just out of the corner of his field of vision the way Minghao shifts his weight at that. “Right. Um. I wanted to talk to you about that, actually.”

Mingyu does look at him with that, because Minghao sounds strangely nervous. “What?”

Minghao’s eyebrows are pulled together, bottom lip red like he was biting it a second ago (Mingyu wants to bite it, too, suddenly, but that’s maybe the worst thought right now). “Just. Um, normally, when I’m back in town, I just get a room at a hotel that’s, like, twenty minutes away.” He brushes his hair out of his eyes with a hand, swallows before continuing. “If you have a spare couch, though, uh. I mean, I’ll help around, still, but - I know you might not be into all the company, I can head out when the snow clears up, it’s really not that big a deal.”

It’s bizarre, but Mingyu is maybe even more awkwardly charmed by Minghao babbling like this. He ends up just shaking his head and poking at the pan with a wooden spoon before answering. “You can stay, Minghao, it’s fine.”

That seems to take Minghao aback, even though he was the one who brought it up in the first place. “Oh. Okay.” He bites his lip again, and if he wasn’t sitting on his hands Mingyu can clearly imagine the way that his fingers would be twisting together in his lap. “Thanks, um. For feeding me, and everything.”

Mingyu stupidly thinks of the cats, the grey one which is still hanging around despite seeming to only barely tolerate Mingyu. “No problem,” he says, instead of anything else about how skinny Minghao seems and how the house seems calmer, quieter, warmer with him there. “It’s easier cooking for two, kind of. I usually make too much.”

That finally gets Minghao to relax a bit, spine curving and jaw going a little more loose. “Well, if I’m just doing you a favor, then that’s fine,” he says, tone back to being just lightly sarcastic and teasing as he kicks out to nudge Mingyu’s hip with his toes. “You can thank me, then.”

The next day the snow is mostly melted, just like Minghao said, the sun a pale yellow but still bright in the sky.

Minghao disappears around ten in the morning only to show back up five hours later with a couple of bags and a newly-full backpack.

“Chan keeps some of my stuff when I go out of town,” he explains as he unpacks some more clothes into the small dresser in the second bedroom. “I don’t usually need much, when I’m here. I like to travel light.”

Mingyu eyes the three pairs of sneakers that he pulls out of one of the bags. “Sure.”

They manage to get the mattress out of the attic and into the empty bed frame in the second bedroom with little disaster. The worst that happens is they have to kind of fold it a little to fit in through the hatch to get it down, and when it bounces back to its full shape it whacks Mingyu in the nose.

It wasn’t _that_ funny. Minghao didn’t have to laugh _that_ much at him.

“You know,” Minghao says, almost as an afterthought as they put some of the extra bedding onto the newly-made bed. “Chan was surprised to hear that I was staying with you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Minghao flips his head to get his hair out of his eyes and stands a step back to let Mingyu finish tucking the quilt in on his side. “I don’t think he thinks you like me much.”

That surprises a snort out of Mingyu, because - it’s kind of true. “Before you left you were just kind of a jerk that showed up sometimes and yelled at me about the house,” he says and straightens up to pat the surface of the bed, pleased. “Now you’re kind of a jerk that yells at me about the house but also, like, helps clean up. It’s big character development.”

Minghao blinks at him and looks honestly a little shocked at all of this before he swipes a hand down his face, revealing a reluctant grin when it drops. “I don’t know _why_ I’m helping you, if this is how I get treated.”

Mingyu shrugs, feeling lighter than he has in ages, and spins to get out of the room before Minghao decides to yell at him some more. “I’m a delight, that’s why,” he says before getting through the door frame and taking off down the hall.

“I’m going to tell the ghosts to trip your ass,” he hears Minghao call out after him, and he actually almost does fall over the carpet from laughing at that.

One day Mingyu wakes up to the sound of more voices than he usually hears in the house, and when he stumbles down the stairs he finds Minghao negotiating sternly with a pair of burly guys standing on the porch.

“Oh good, you’re finally up,” is all Minghao says when Mingyu peers hesitantly past him and out the door. “Go move that air mattress. We’re getting you the proper thing, now.”

Mingyu stammers something - maybe words, but more likely just half-asleep nonsense - but lets Minghao shepard him up the stairs and help him pull the half-deflated air mattress off of the bed frame.

The two men - mattress delivery men, apparently, although that conclusion takes an embarrassingly long time to form in Mingyu’s brain - drag what looks like an obscenely huge mattress up the stairs and make short work of flopping it into the frame.

“Sign this,” Minghao says, thrusting a clipboard into Mingyu’s field of vision as he kind of just stands there and blinks at the mattress.

He takes the clipboard and reflexively skims the wording. “How did you get my credit card info?” is what he ends up asking. Stupid.

“You just kind of leave your wallet sitting places,” Minghao explains, stealing the clipboard away the second Mingyu signs the bottom line. He pushes it at one of the delivery men and then shoos them back in the direction of the stairs. They move quickly, and Mingyu wonders at how threatening a Minghao-in-a-mattress-store must be. “I figured you could afford to treat yourself, with all that royalty money.”

“It’s more appearance fees,” he corrects, before freezing. “It’s not that much, anyways.”

Minghao flaps a hand at him. “You were an actor, obviously you have some money. You’re managing to do the not-very-cheap task of refurbishing an _entire house_ all while not working, and also - look at that face. How could people not just throw money at you?”

He opens the chest at the foot of the bed where they had stored all the king-size bedding after washing and drying it all, and doesn’t look up to see the way that Mingyu’s entire face goes red at that comment. “Here, help me with the fitted sheet.”

A day or two later, Mingyu wakes up in his real bed with about twelve pounds of cat in his face. He has clothes in the dresser and stuff on the bathroom counter, half-dry towels hung up by the mostly-working shower.

Those three pillar candles still sit on top of the dresser, dripping pale wax into a pool at their base, which Minghao has found a dish out of who knows where to sit them in and catch the wax.

Downstairs, the faint sounds of Minghao rattling around in the kitchen ring up through the echoey entrance way in the house.

Mingyu rolls over to bury his face in the pillows, more as an expression of disbelief about this entire situation then because he actually thinks he has a chance at going back to sleep.

He’s not really sure how this happened, but - it feels alright.

Unofficially moving in seems to have completely broken the seal that was kind of holding back all of Minghao’s weird nonsense behavior, it seems, because now Mingyu walks downstairs to the kitchen to find him standing over one of the huge stock pots and peering down into it, steam wafting up and making his hair curl over his ears.

Minghao notices him enter, rubbing his eyes and yawning, and just kind of waves at him absent-mindedly before going back to what seems to be an actual, literal, witch’s cauldron. “Good morning. You look like a zombie.”

“What the fuck are you doing.”

“Wow, that’s pretty harsh language for,” Minghao reaches over to unlock his phone just enough to check the clock, “seven-thirty in the morning. Wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”

“It smells like a spice rack in here,” Mingyu grumbles, and collapses in a pile at the kitchen table. “Are you ruining my pots?”

“ _Your_ pots,” Minghao sniffs, and stirs whatever he’s got going on with a wooden spoon. “I think these came with the house.”

“Yeah. _My_ house. My house, my pots, my fucking - like, _wallpaper_ that you’re definitely going to peel off from whatever you’re doing.”

“You know, now it’s obvious you’re an actor. You’re amazing at the dramatics.” Minghao punctuates ‘dramatics’ with a little whirl of his spoon. “I’m almost done, you can just have your coffee and grump around until then.”

“I’m not _dramatic_ ,” Mingyu mutters into his arms, where he’s buried his head into them on the table just enough that he can still keep an eye on Minghao at the stove. “Seriously, though, what is that?”

“Yebin’s come down with a bad case of the flu,” Minghao says, which isn’t even really an answer. “Chan texted earlier and asked if I could make her something, because I think she’s making him miserable.”

Mingyu turns those particular sentences over in his mind. “So. What is that?”

“I’m getting there.” Minghao gives the pot one final stir before clicking the flame off on the burner and using two dishtowels to haul the whole thing onto the cooler side of the stove. “This’ll help, basically.”

Mingyu sniffs the air hesitantly. “Help clear her sinuses, sure.”

“God, do I have to make your coffee, or will you get it yourself so you can stop being awful?” Minghao’s mouth is twisted up just a bit in the corners, and he shoots Mingyu a bemused look. “You’re just going to make fun of me more if I tell you what it is.”

“Nuh-uh.” Mingyu’s words are muffled, his mouth basically smushed up against the skin of his arm. “‘Promise.”

Minghao eyes him critically for a moment before letting out a gusty sigh and turning to wash the spoon off in the sink. “It’s a tonic, basically. It should help settle her stomach and improve the fever, make the recovery process a little more bearable.”

“It _is_ a magic potion, then.”

Minghao looks like he seriously regrets not whapping him over the head with the spoon. “I knew you’d say that.”

“No, just - did the woman who lived here before teach you all this?” Mingyu straightens up, pulling his head up from the pillow of his arms, and gestures vaguely around the room. “All the candles, and flowers, and stuff.”

“Sort of, I guess.” Minghao’s mouth twists, like he’s thinking about what to say. “I kind of grew up around all of it. It’s not really something you learn, though.” He actually plugs the coffee maker in and starts measuring grounds - Mingyu’s stomach does a flip. “It’s a lot of instinct.”

“Sure.” Mingyu eyes the small dish of dried flower petals that found its way to the center of the kitchen table the other day. “You know - the fire place was full of ashes, when I got the thing unboarded.”

Minghao hums as he pours water into the tank before hitting the button to get the thing brewing. “Isn’t that where you’d expect to find those?”

“Yeah, but - like, _full_ of ashes.” Mingyu makes a rough outline with his hands to indicate just how tall the pile was, and Minghao raises his eyebrows at him. “Is that a thing? Burning stuff?”

The coffee maker makes its usual horrible growling noise as it starts to heat up, and Minghao wanders over to sit at the chair diagonal from Mingyu, just across the curve of the table. “Sometimes,” he says, tilting his head to think. The movement makes the sweater he’s wearing, thin and a dark maroon that makes his skin look paler than normal, dip down over one collarbone. “That’s not so much for the practical things, though. It’s more - spiritual, I guess.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Practical stuff is like the stuff I just made,” and he nods back towards the stove, “or - remember when you had that awful sunburn?”

Mingyu nods instead of verbally responding, and his mind recalls the cool touch of fingertips just below his hairline.

“That’s the kind of thing where you can actually see the difference you’re making. That’s what - what old lady Wu specialized in, mostly, medicine and balms and stuff.” Minghao quiets for a beat, all skinny limbs bent like a nest made of twigs so he can fit in the cup of the chair. “The other stuff is what involves a bit more faith. It’s kind of like astrology, you know? Like, you don’t know it works, but if it works for _you_ then what’s the harm?”

“What do you do, for that kind of stuff?”

“It’s like…” Minghao drifts off, one finger tracing vague shapes in the wood of the table, before he continues. “It’s a lot of putting meaning into the things you’re using. Like scraps of cloth that indicate certain people, or words that mean certain things.”

Mingyu’s mind, out of nowhere, flickers back to the first time he met Chan, and the image of a piece of ripped fabric and a tarnished coin. “What can it do?”

Minghao shrugs, shoulders pointy and unsure. “Lots of stuff. Whatever you want it to do, to a degree.” He lets out another breath, and suddenly he looks strange and untouchable, cast in the weak sunlight barely reaching the kitchen through the trees outside. “Give you confidence, inspire good luck, encourage someone to miss you… those kind of things.”

“Oh.” Mingyu squirms in his chair, just a little, feeling a bit like he’s walked through a door that he should have kept ignoring. “Do you do a lot of that?”

“Not really - I mean. Little things.” He reaches out and tugs the bowl of flowers over with two fingers. “Things like this, or the candles, they help inspire comfort and protection. It’s not like some candles could, like, stop a burglar in their tracks, or help protect from floods or whatever, but it’s kind of like nudging things in the direction you want them to go in. It can’t hurt, and it might help, just a bit.”

The house is warm, filled with the smell of dried flowers and the thick spices of whatever Minghao made for Yebin, the air almost like a physical presence all around Mingyu.

He imagines, if he was outside standing at the start of the driveway, that the house would be visible through the bare trees. It feels like it should be glowing, with how full it is.

His heart makes a worrying half-skip in his chest, because suddenly all he wants is to tug Minghao closer by the thin wrist. He wants to bury his face in the spot where his neck meets his shoulder and where his sweaters seemingly never cover, and just breath him in.

He imagines he would smell like green, fresh, growing herbs, even for how everything inside is dried and preserved. Minghao doesn’t seem like he’s been put away for storage, just yet - he looks like he still has potential, even for how deep his roots are in the ground.

Mingyu doesn’t touch him, doesn’t press his mouth the bone under his brow or the bow of his lips or the jut of his throat, and that’s a good thing. The alternative is losing this - and, now, the thought of going back to the empty house filled only with Mingyu and the maybe-ghosts of the past seems like the worst possible ending to this story.

 

Of course he completely forgets his first conversation with Josh over the phone, back in the dark and dust of the house, until it’s already late December.

“I have a break in filming in a few weeks,” Joshua says in Mingyu’s ear, connection more stable than not for once so it doesn’t sound like he’s melting into static every couple of minutes. “Does that work for you?”

Mingyu takes what feels like a full minute to process this, although it couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds. “Oh. Um. For your visit, you mean.”

Josh laughs and Mingyu sees Minghao perk up from where he’s sitting almost completely absorbed into the couch, paperback book falling a few inches in his hands. “Yeah, if that’s still an option. I’d like to see the house I’ve heard so much about.”

“Right, um, of course.” Mingyu had been taking a quick break from attempts at shoveling the driveway after they had gotten another couple of inches of snow overnight, which is a feat considering he’d been trying not to disturb the gravel too much, and he can feel himself sweating now underneath his gloves and the collar of his coat. “It’ll be good to see you.”

He can feel Minghao’s eyes on him like a physical weight, like the sense he gets when he knows there’s a cat in the room with him but he hasn’t been able to spot it yet.

“Seriously, I miss you. It’s just not the same without you around to blame whenever any of us accidentally break filming equipment.” The words are teasing but Joshua’s voice is warmly kind, like the audio version of a fond hair ruffle. “How is everything? Is your new roommate still there?”

Mingyu hadn’t wanted to tell Josh about Minghao staying there at first, but it had ended up being inevitable. “Yeah,” he says, not really wanting to say anything that would make Minghao lock on harder to listening to the conversation. “How about you?”

Joshua laughs again, like he knows what Mingyu’s doing, but he lets him change the subject gamely enough. “Doing fine, all things considered. Dyed my hair again.”

“Again?” Mingyu finally accepts the fact that this conversation may last longer than he wants to be standing there in his boots and coat, so he starts attempting to unlace them with one hand. “It’s all going to fall out soon, old man. What color?”

“Blonde.” Joshua makes a suffering kind of noise that Mingyu sympathizes with, but which still makes him snort. “Like, a dark blonde, kind of brown, but still - bleach, you know?”

“Yeah.” Mingyu had been cast in a role that required him to go almost platinum blonde, back when he was maybe twenty, and it hadn’t been fun. “That’ll be interesting to see.”

“Hopefully it’ll be gone by then,” Josh says. “I’m planning on going back to black the second filming wraps.”

Mingyu whistles the one bar of Amy Winehouse that he remembers. “When is that?”

“Scheduled for January tenth, so hopefully we don’t get delayed. I wanted to come by on the fourteenth, if that’s okay? Just for the weekend,” Josh continues, because he can’t see the way Mingyu stumbles a little in untying his shoes. “I have some stuff that Tuesday that I’ll need to be back for. Does that work?”

“Yeah, um. That should be fine.” Mingyu doesn’t exactly have a schedule he needs to check, anymore - the only commitments he really has are when Chan texts him a day and a time and then shows up with a six-pack and too many high fives for him and Minghao. “I’ll text you the travel info that I used, it’s kind of complicated.”

“I may drive,” Josh says, which - of course he will. “I like driving, it’s more time to myself than I usually get.”

“Right,” Mingyu says, and sits down fully on the carpet to actually yank his boots off. “I’ll text you the address, still, though.”

“Sounds good. Is there anything you need? Like, for a housewarming present.”

“Oh my god, you really are turning into my mom in your old age. No, we’re fine, don’t inconvenience yourself.”

Josh hums curiously, and Mingyu realizes the plural that he just let slip. “I’ll bring groceries,” he finally says. “I know you’ll end up insisting on cooking, so this way you have to let me help a little.”

“Wine and cookie mix don’t count as groceries, Josh,” Mingyu teases, getting his other boot off. “Throw some vegetables in there, too. Maybe a protein.”

“You’re getting too snarky, Kim Mingyu,” Joshua replies. “I can tell, you need me there to knock you down a peg.”

“Like you’ve ever been good at that.”

“I do alright, excuse you.” There’s some muffled sounds, and a low voice in the background on the other end of the line, and Joshua comes back after a moment. “I have to go, we’re going to be late to a script reading. I’ll talk to you soon?”

“Yeah,” Mingyu says, and when he hangs up the phone and glances back at Minghao he has the sudden urge to physically hide from the force of the ‘definitely not listening to your conversation, nope, I don’t care about anything you’re up to’ vibe that’s coming off of him in waves. He has his nose buried in the book he’s reading, although Mingyu hasn’t seen him turn the page in ages, and he’s very studiously Not Looking At Mingyu.

“How’s the book?” Mingyu asks after what is probably the weirdest stand-off he’s been in.

Minghao twitches his eyes up to look at Mingyu before going right back to the book. “Fine. How’s the shoveling going,” he says, more an accusation than a question.

“Mostly just disturbing a bunch of gravel,” Mingyu confesses, getting his coat off much more quickly than the boots now that he has the use of both hands. “Thanks for the help, also.”

Minghao sniffs and finally turns a page, the paper almost translucent with how thin and old it is. “I don’t like to spend too much time outside when it’s below freezing.”

“Of course. Don’t tell me you have that delicate of a constitution - I’m sure you’ve got some kind of spell to cure the common cold.”

“I don’t have _spells_ ,” Minghao pronounces the word like it’s profane, somehow. “And it’s just my preference, thanks. Why go outside when there’s a perfectly good inside right here?”

Mingyu laughs and shakes his head, shrugging out of his coat and tossing it next to him on the floor. “Obviously. Hey,” he continues, before he can psych himself out of it, “is it okay if a friend of mine visits in a few weeks?”

He doesn’t include the ‘will you still be here then?’ that he thinks, but he wonders if Minghao can hear it anyways.

Minghao gives him a unreadable look from the couch. “A friend?” He asks it like he didn’t just spend the last few minutes eavesdropping on half of Mingyu’s conversation, but it’s still kind of a fair question.

“Yeah, um.” Mingyu grips his ankles with his hands where they’re crossed in front of him, and resists the urge to rock back and forth nervously. “His name’s Joshua - Jisoo, but he usually goes by Joshua, uh, with me. I’ve known him for awhile, and he wants to see the house.”

Minghao has a thick knit blanket pulled around his shoulders, and he tugs it a little tighter as he seems to mull it over. Mingyu knows better - he’s positive that Minghao knew his answer to this question before Mingyu even hung up the phone. “Why not,” he finally deigns Mingyu with. “You can show the place off.”

Mingyu laughs a little. “Yeah, it’s really ready for entertaining.”

“It’s in good shape, you know.” One of Minghao’s eyebrows arches up. “But yeah, that’s fine. In a few weeks?”

“Yeah, in the middle of January.”

Minghao nods, absently, mind already apparently on other topics.

There’s a few minutes of silence as Mingyu sits there and avoids going back outside to finish shoveling the driveway, when all of a sudden Minghao lets out a shocked kind of squeak.

It actually startles Mingyu enough that he has to catch himself before just tipping completely over, and the wasted moment leaves him swiveling around and blinking as Minghao tumbles off of the couch, getting his footing quickly, and taking off through the house.

“What the fuck?” Mingyu shouts after him, stumbling to a standing position too to try and follow him.

“It’s almost the new year!” Is what Minghao yells back, from what seems to be upstairs - how did he get up there already? “We need to get the fireplace unblocked! Do you have a ladder?”

Mingyu pauses at the foot of the staircase, one hand on the banister, peering up the stairs where he can just catch a glimpse of Minghao hopping to open the hatch to the attic. “You know, most people get panicked when they realize they forgot about Christmas coming up.”

“That’s all an entirely different thing,” Minghao replies, running down the hall to grab the office chair so he can haul it back to stand on and wiggle his way up into the attic. “This is actual, real stuff. C’mere, I’ll need you to give me a boost.”

Mingyu actually wonders, for a second, what would happen if he just didn’t go upstairs.

The conclusion he comes to is immediate, clear images of Minghao trying to get up to the roof regardless and falling quickly to his death.

Mingyu sighs heavily and stomps up the stairs.

“Wow, take long enough?” is the greeting he gets when he pulls himself up into the attic.

He hasn’t been up here since Minghao started clearing it out, and the difference honestly isn’t that big. Right now Minghao is sitting on the thin rug laid out over the floorboards, surrounded by a small pile of paperback books and holding a thin wax candle that he’s doing something to - “Where did you get a pocket knife?”

Minghao purses his lips and rolls his eyes at him without even pausing in what is, apparently, whittling the sides of the candle. “You ask dumb questions sometimes. What happened to the ladder?”

“I don’t have a ladder.” Mingyu sits down on the outside of the circle of books and other nonsense that surround Minghao. He always feels a bit crowded, over-large in the attic, while Minghao seems to fit in immediately and easily, at home with the dust and the sloped, wooden ceiling. “I borrow one from Chan, sometimes.”

Minghao grumbles and brushes some of the wax shavings off of the candle. “Well that’s absolutely no help right now. How confident are you in not busting right through the floor out there?” he asks, nodding to the window that leads out to the decorative porch off the side of the attic.

“Honestly? Not very.”

“Well,” Minghao says, finally setting down the candle - which now has a series of undecipherable swirls and lines carved into and around it, for whatever reason Mingyu will never understand - and brushing his hands free of wax before rising to his knees. “No time like the present, huh? Come give me a boost.”

Climbing through the window onto the balcony is a bit of a process. The window opens easy enough but it kind of has to be propped open with a little latch at the top, and it doesn’t leave enough room for either of them to crawl out. Mingyu ends up unscrewing the top of the window from the latch so they can take the whole thing, frame and glass and all, completely off and set it on the ground next to them.

They sit shoulder-to-shoulder, peering out at the balcony, wind ruffling their hair for a moment before Minghao claps his hands and grips the edge of the window.

“I’ll go first,” he says, and Mingyu barely manages to squash the sudden, stupid urge to grab his hips and yank him back when Minghao just starts clambering over the windowsill.

There’s a good couple of inches of snow out there, and Minghao pauses enough to sweep most of it away - it’s dry, powdery, and blows away easily. Then, he gets one knee onto the balcony.

It holds, and Minghao carefully lowers the other down, settling his full weight on the porch even for how tightly he’s still gripping the windowsill.

“All good?” Mingyu asks, watching nervously as Minghao shifts his weight and then rises onto his knees.

“Hasn’t collapsed yet,” Minghao replies, grin just a little ironic. “C’mere, you try.”

Mingyu really, really isn’t sure how this is a good idea, but he puts his game face on and tentatively gets one, then the other, knee onto the wood floor of the balcony.

Minghao lets go of the window with one hand and uses it to grip the balcony railing, shifting back to give Mingyu room on the not especially large porch. “Okay,” he says, tilting his head up to eye the distance between them and the roof. “We’re actually kind of in luck, since the roof is sloped down over here. I think I could probably get up if you give me a boost.”

Mingyu swallows down the urge to look over the side of the balcony and towards the ground, because he really probably doesn’t need to know how high up they are right now, and instead follows Minghao’s line of sight. The slight overhang to the roof really doesn’t seem that high - if Mingyu stood up he would be able to grab it easily.

“Should I get a chair or something?”

“If it’ll fit through the window, maybe.” Minghao doesn’t turn, still squinting against the pale grey sunlight towards the roof. “I don’t think we’ll need it.”

He stands up and Mingyu, again, stamps down on the urge to brace him against a hypothetical fall. Everything holds, though - the floorboards don’t even creak.

Minghao makes a pleased noise and reaches up to touch the roof overhang. He’s just tall enough that he can lay his hand flat on the top of the roof without going up on his toes, and Mingyu - when he finally drums up the courage to follow - can grip the ledge easily.

He’s only standing at his full height for a second before Minghao tugs down on his shoulder.

“Here, boost me, c’mon,” he says, making Mingyu lace his fingers together so Minghao can basically use him as a step. “I’ll help pull you up when I’m up there, but it should be about the same as getting up into the attic. Just use those acting muscles.” Minghao punctuates that fairly ridiculous statement with a crooked grin and a squeeze on Mingyu’s biceps, which are alright but definitely suffering from the lack of a personal trainer for the last couple months, definitely.

Still, it proves pretty easy to get Minghao up on the roof. Mingyu almost gets kicked in the face at one point, but it’s not that bad considering neither of them are wearing shoes.

It’s actually probably a dumb idea, all things considered, but Mingyu still follows Minghao up. He manages to use his ‘acting muscles’ just fine, thanks, to pull himself up onto the slant of the roof, and Minghao gives him a hand to scramble up the initially steep angle of the roof and up to where it’s more stable.

Or, actually, completely flat.

“Oh, woah,” Mingyu says before his brain can tell him how dumb that sounds. The roof slants up steeply from the sides before flattening completely at the very top, forming a level rectangle with a thin wooden railing around it.

“It’s a widow’s walk,” Minghao clarifies, as if Mingyu’s never seen one before. Which, ok, he hasn’t exactly, but he gets the concept. “Not exactly usual for the area, considering we’re pretty inland, but it’s kind of nice up here.”

Mingyu gets his feet under him and hauls himself into a standing position, gripping the sides of the widow’s walk fence. “Don’t these usually have, like, a method of getting up here that’s not climbing up the side of the building?”

Minghao shoots him a kind of delighted grin for that, which momentarily blinds Mingyu. “Right? I never understood why this was up here, if no one could use it.” He hops over the fence around the platform and lowers into a crouch to inspect a spot of roofing that’s different than the rest, made of rough wood rather than painted, smooth beams. “It’s built over the chimney, though, see?”

Mingyu follows, significantly less graceful at getting over the fence than Minghao, and peers over his shoulder at the boarded-up section. “So we just have to get that off?”

“Yeah, but it should be easy.” Minghao settles down on the floor of the walk and sets to pulling up the boards. The first one actually pops out pretty easily at one corner - it hadn’t really been properly nailed in, and the corner connecting the board to the roof had gotten pretty rotted and wet throughout all the snow.

Once they get the first board out it’s just a matter of getting the right leverage to yank the rest of them off. The snow starts again as they work, just a light flurry that catches in Mingyu’s eyelashes and in the fabric of Minghao’s sweater.

Mingyu pulls back to sit on his hands and try to warm them as Minghao gets the last board up and off of the roof. They both peer down into the hole that it reveals - bricked walls and a distinct, sooty scent, even if they can’t see farther than a foot or two down it.

“Perfect,” Minghao says, tossing the last board into a small pile he’s made to their side. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“Yeah,” Mingyu replies, leaning back from the chimney carefully. “We didn’t actually fall through anything. That sounds like a success to me.”

Minghao actually reaches out and swats Mingyu on the knee for that, which surprises him enough to let out a yelp. “We’re _fine_ , don’t be a drama queen.” Minghao’s flushed high in his cheeks and at the tip of his nose, probably half because of the cold and half because of the adrenaline of climbing up here, and Mingyu can’t quite look away.

“You need the fireplace for the new year?” He asks instead of doing something less smart, like reaching out to feel the heat of Minghao’s blush, or brushing the snowflakes out of his dark hair. “What for?”

“Fire is really big with the spiritual, like, cleansing stuff.” Minghao draws his knees up and leans back against the railing, completely oblivious to the way Mingyu’s stomach sweeps, panicked and waiting for the wood to give out against his weight. This roof is really not good for his anxiety. “It’s important to start the new year fresh, everyone knows that. There’s just a couple things we always did to help with that.”

“Like, new year’s resolutions?”

“I guess.” Minghao seems to finally be feeling the cold of the outside around them, and he tucks his hands between his knees. “It’s more of that metaphorical kind of - of, all of this. It’s more about the meaning you put into it than what you actually do.” His face is getting redder, now, like he’s embarrassed, and Mingyu watches the way that the pink travels to his ears and down his neck with rapt attention.

“It’ll be cool to see it,” he says.

Minghao scoffs and looks to the side, brushing one hand through his hair and shaking some of the snowflakes loose. “It’s not that interesting, really.” He pauses, and then glances again at Mingyu with a assessing look. “You’re not going anywhere for the holidays, then?”

That makes Mingyu want to squirm, but he very gamely doesn’t, instead gripping his ankles and wishing for a second that he’d wasted a moment to put his coat or boots back on before following Minghao up here. “No, I don’t think so. My mom’ll be busy entertaining, and my sister will be there to keep her company. It’s kind of a long trip, and, um. I’ll visit her another time. We never were really into, like, Christmas, or any of that,” he continues, feeling somehow like he has to defend himself. “It’s no big deal.”

Minghao’s mouth twists interestingly, and he hums. “Just your friend coming, then? Jisoo.”

“Yeah.”

They sit there for a moment, the snow drifting slowly down around them and the sky a lazy grey.

It feels, almost, like the house is slowly breathing underneath them. Like sitting on giants.

Mingyu’s spine tingles, and he lays his palms flat against the wood flooring like that’ll calm it down. Like petting an overlarge cat, or trying to settle an earthquake.

Then, Minghao lets out a breath. Mingyu imagines the house exhaling in echo, relaxing underneath them. “Should we try to get down before the snow gets heavier and things get really slippery, then?”

“Probably a good idea.”

Minghao’s face had relaxed in the silence, but his mouth twitches back up in a smile at that. Mingyu really wants to stop feeling so gut-punched each time that happens. “Sounds like a plan.”

They stand up, Mingyu using the railing to balance because he really, really doesn’t want to somehow fall down the chimney like some very unlucky Santa Clause.

After getting his footing he glances out over the railing and - oh.

He’d known, logically, how wide the forest spread out around the house. He hadn’t really gone too far into it, beyond the occasional trip in the passenger seat of Chan’s truck to help him with an errand or two along some of the hiking trails, but that had been different.

It was one thing to be standing in the thick of the trees, looking up through the boughs of leaves at the patchwork sunlight that shown through, head level with maybe the shortest of the branches.

It was an entirely different thing to be up here, the trees above them bare, almost entirely surrounded on all sides by the forest.

The house wasn’t anywhere near tall enough to break through the actual treetops, and it was stationed in a small clearing, anyways. The nearest trees were just along the edge of the backyard, and they grew thicker and thicker from there on.

They must be near the gradual curve up into the mountains, though, because the whole effect was like sitting in the bowl of the earth, watching the trees rise to meet the skyline. The branches were skeletal but not in any sort of eerie, unnerving way - they looked more delicate, fragile, and Mingyu briefly entertained the idea that they needed someone to cup them in their hands, protective.

He doesn’t notice Minghao move to stand next to him along the railing until he speaks, voice hushed as if he doesn't want to break through the silence, but he can’t help himself. “Usually,” he says, and Mingyu blinks but doesn’t turn away from the trees. “Widow’s walks are along the shoreline, you know? For women to wait for their husbands to come back from the sea.” Minghao leans forward just a bit on the railing, arm brushing Mingyu’s. “They’re always for watching over something, though. For getting a higher vantage point, to wait.”

Minghao feels unnaturally warm next to Mingyu, and he has to stop and consciously tip a degree over to not lean in towards that warmth. “What do you wait for,” he says, voice coming out low and quiet, breath barely visible in the air, “from the woods?”

Minghao’s silent for a moment, and Mingyu glances down to watch his hands shift along the top rung of the railing, knuckles pale. “I always saw it more as a reminder, that the woods will be there even when what you’re waiting for isn’t,” he says finally, and when Mingyu finally raises his eyes to look at him he’s watching him back, eyebrows titled just a bit down and eyes a warm green-grey-brown. “It’s something you can depend on. Because, turns out,” and he shrugs wryly, but doesn’t look away from Mingyu. “You can’t depend on most other things.”

Mingyu frowns, and feels very keenly like he’s standing on the edge of something more than just the edge of the platform, high above the yard and the rest of the house.

Minghao watches him back, mouth tilting down, hair wind-ruffled and eyes sharp.

Then, it clicks, and Mingyu wonders if it’s just in his mind that the house lets out another, deep sigh below them. “You lived here.”

Minghao seems surprised, somehow, and it punches a sharp laugh out of him. “How do you figure that?” he asks, and it’s so clearly not a denial that Mingyu just feels more like an idiot.

“You - the house knows you,” he says, then shakes his head. “Or, you know the house. Or both. I’m not sure, I’m still kind of figuring that much out.” He huffs, though, and rakes his hair back from his forehead. A nervous tic, which he’d thought he was getting better about. “But it makes sense, now, it probably should have before. You care a lot about it, you know a lot about it, you - you knew old lady Wu.”

Then, that clicks another piece of the train tracks together in Mingyu’s mind, and he glances at Minghao. “Or - who was she, really?”

Minghao’s quiet for a long moment, peering up at Mingyu. They aren’t that different in height, not really, so he only has to look up a few inches towards him. It makes his chin tip up, and Mingyu remembers the proud way that Minghao had stood there, on the rotted-through porch, and demanded to know what Mingyu was doing with the house - with _his_ house, Mingyu realizes, sickly.

“She was my grandma,” Minghao finally answers. He looks away, breaking the connection of - something - that had started to weave between them and turning towards the trees. “I didn’t really _live_ here - we had a house closer to the center of town, but. The attic was mine.”

He looks down at the white-painted railing and picks at a chip in the paint, and Mingyu watches the hesitant movement of his fingers. “We’d visit most weekends, and my cousins and I would stay here a lot of the summer. Nobody else really went in the attic - they thought it was creepy,” he admits, and Mingyu watches a smile twitch on the corner of his lips. “I always liked it,though. The only way to get up then was this, like, rope ladder, and once you were up there no one could bother you.”

Minghao goes distant, vague, and Mingyu picks up the conversation carefully where he left it. “Why didn’t anyone take the house when she, um. When it was empty?”

The air shivers with the cold, and the wind picks up. “I was nine when she died,” Minghao says, tone flat. “My mom was already planning on moving into a smaller house, closer to the center of town, so I’d be closer to school and she could get a better job. The rest of my family… They didn’t get Grandma as well as we did.”

Minghao tips his head to the side, away from Mingyu, and seems to consider something before continuing. “She never wanted the house to be controlled,” he says. “She was very into, like, letting things naturally take their course.” He lets out a cloudy breath and smiles, kind of. “Destiny, sort of, if you want to think about it that way. I don’t really remember her too well, but there were things like that that were just such a strong _thing_ about her that they stuck.”

He rolls his shoulders back like they’re tense, and looks back up at Mingyu. “I guess,” he says, voice still flat but a degree warmer, just barely, his words absorbing the slight heat through convection, “that the house wanted you here.”

The wind whirls snow around them, standing like a lighthouse amid the rolling waves of bare trees, with spots of conifer pines still green and dusted with white here and there.

Mingyu, helplessly, clutches tighter to the wooden railing because he suddenly feels like he’s liable to pitch completely off of the house.

Minghao’s eyelashes are dark, thin but long and kind of clumping together where they’re wet from snow. His nose and ears and cheeks are still red, and is mouth looks soft and kind of pale.

He inhales, barely, when Mingyu’s eyes flicker down to his mouth for a bare second before flitting right back to his eyes.

The house, underneath them, settles like a bear finally curling in for a long hibernation.

 

They do come down off the roof, sometime after all that. Minghao starts shivering visibly, sweater thin and jeans ripped at his thighs because he’s an idiot, and Mingyu makes him slide feet-first down the slope of the roof leading to the balcony.

Mingyu really wanted to go first, but Minghao had snorted and shook his hair like one of those horses in movies about girls and their wild ponies. “What are you going to do if I start falling off the house,” he says, scooting forward enough that his legs dangle off the edge of the roof and towards the balcony. “Catch me? That seems a bit much, even for you, mister leading man.”

He jumps down graceful enough as Mingyu watches, absolutely not pouting after him. “I could,” he grumbles, setting down to slide down himself. “You’re not that heavy.”

Minghao’s already climbing back into the attic through the window when Mingyu lands safely, the balcony only making a slightly worrying creaky noise as he goes. “I’m going to try stoking the chimney,” he says over his shoulder, not looking back as he crawls over to the hatch down to the hallway and tosses his feet down it. “See if we have to get it cleaned or something.”

“Okay.” Mingyu follows in just enough to get past the window frame and then sits down, next to where they’d propped the window up against the wall, screwdriver sitting by it. “I’ll, um. Put the window back on, I guess.”

Minghao nods, distracted, and hops down through the door, landing with a soft thump in the hallway underneath them.

Mingyu sits there, back against the wall, knees drawn up, and looks around the attic - he feels, a little, like it’s the first time he came in here, all over again.

The attic didn’t have any indication that it had served, essentially, as a kid’s secret clubhouse. It had been mostly cleared out, and what had been in here were things an adult might scatter around if they were in and out a few times, every now and then - paperback mystery novels, size large sweaters, dark-colored bedsheets.

Mingyu sits and tries to fit together the image of a small Minghao hiding away up here with that of the current Minghao, abrasive and confident and mysteriously other-worldly, for all that he is still very, incredible present and physical.

He wonders at where they might intersect, and slowly that intersection comes in the form of someone ignoring the rest of the house and swinging themself up into the attic, just every now and then, when they were in town. Leaving a few things but not too many, just enough movement in and out to keep the room mostly dust-free and with only a few cobwebs in the corners.

Mingyu thinks about the tin that that the key to the attic had been hiding in, underneath the floorboards of the platform that Minghao had set up tentative shop on during the late summer.

He remembers the shocked look that had shot across Minghao’s face when he’d dug the key out of the tin - the piece of rope it had been hung on, which he’d seen once hanging off of Minghao’s wrist.

Mingyu sits there, tips his head back against the wall to look up at the ceiling, with the winter wind still blowing through the open window next to him and sending goosebumps up his arm.

He thinks, for a few long minutes, about the kind of faith required to come back to the same place no matter how much one travels, to come back to a house filled with dust and ghosts that doesn’t even belong to you, not really, because it belongs entirely to itself.

Then, because Mingyu at heart really is a bit of a masochist, he thinks about the kind of cowardice that comes from running so completely away from somewhere, no matter how much you might be able to help, just because it makes your stomach sick.

His phone is still downstairs, where he left it after hanging up on the phone call with Joshua, but for a second he imagines that he can hear the way it will buzz constantly if he ever turned his email app back on.

He thinks about duty, and trust, and confidence. He thinks about cold gazes through camera lenses and the feeling that you could have done better, _should_ have done better, and that there’s no coming back from this now.

Mingyu, slowly, curls forward, back curving like a comma, and buries his mouth in his arms which he folds and props up on his knees. 

From downstairs he can faintly hear the movement two floors away. Minghao tends to move quietly, carefully, graceful and light-footed - clearly, Mingyu thinks, comfortable in the house. Obviously. Stupid.

Mingyu sits there, listening to the faint clatter of noise from below him, thinking about how a person can piece together the courage to come back to something even if they have no clue if there’s anything there for them, and, slowly, makes plans.

 

The problem with dreaming is this:

The most important ones are just as likely to slip away, thin as a wisp, in the morning air.

The dreaming done awake is too tempered by conscious logic and reason.

And the dreaming done asleep is too vulnerable to a thin pillow and a creaky floor.


End file.
